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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. * 



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THE THEATRE: 



AN ESSAY UPON THE NON-ACCORDANCY OF STAGE-PLAYS WITH 
THE CHRISTIAN PROFESSION. 



3^ 



L BY / 

JOSIAH W. LEEDS. 




PHILADELPHIA: 

No. B28 WALNUT STREET. 

Published for the Author. 






"THE THEATRES ARE FOUNTAINS AND MEANS OF VICE. I CAN 
HARDLY THINK THERE IS A CHRISTIAN UPON EARTH WHO WOULD 
DARE TO BE SEEN THERE IF THE NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE 
THEATRE WERE PROPERLY SET BEFORE Km.."— JOHN NEWTON. 






PREFATORY NOTE. 



Although most of the following essay recently appeared 
in a weekly periodical of the Society of Friends, the writer 
had likewise in view, in preparing it, its probable re-issue as 
a tract, and circulation over a much wider field. He has 
since been encouraged by many to carry out "that purpose. 

It will be admitted that some treatises upon the theatre 
exhibit the abounding wickedness of the stage with so much 
fidelity that, although very useful in certain hands, they are 
not exactly fitted for reading aloud in families or for perusal 
by the young generally. Indeed, they may even stimulate a 
morbid interest in place of inciting, as desired, sentiments 
of repugnance against and abhorrence for the detailed evil. 
The writer has been solicitous in the following pages to avoid 
this objection. But, though less full in the direction pointed 
out than some others, it is hoped that this essay will prove 
of definite value in that it deals with sundry aspects of the 
subject which are usually either not at all or not much con- 
sidered in treating of the play-house and its perils. 

Philadelphia, Seventh Month, 1884. 



The Theatre of the Past. 

In his treatise De Spectaculis, that 
early Christian writer, Tertullian, says: "I heard lately a novel defense of 
himself by a certain play-lover. ' The sun,' said he — ' nay, God Himself — 
looks down from heaven on the show, and no pollution is contracted.' 
Yes, and the sun, too, pours down his rays into the common sewer with- 
out being defiled. But He [God] looks on robbers, too; He looks on 
falsehoods, and adulteries, and frauds, and idolatries, and these same 
shows; and precisely on that account we will not look on them lest the 
Ml- Seeing see us." 



The Theatre of the Present. 

Says Bishop Coxe, of Western New 
York : "All that theory can adduce in defense of a possible drama 
vanishes before the gross sensuality of the actual stage. The voice of 
Christian antiquity denounces as anti- Christian the whole system of the 
play-house, and the very heathen lash as obscene and shameful, scenes 
which are exhibited to ' young men and maidens ' in New York and all 
over the land. 'I go to the theatre myself,' said a young man to me 
lately, 'but I thought the devil himself must have laughed when he saw a 
communicant of the Church there.' " 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The scope of this essay 8 

Rome and Athens condemn the thea- 
tre, 9 

Not tolerated by primitive Chris- 
tians, 11 

Testified against by many Councils, . . 13 
Prynne upon reforming the stage, . . 13 

Testimony of Hannah More, 14 

The stage not a school of morals, ... 16 
Adverse testimony of play-actors, . . . 18 

Gibber and Dumas, 18 

Booth, Macready, and Knowles, ... 19 

Kemble and Siddons, 20 

Dispassionate testimony of Montague 

Stanley, 21 

A changed American actor, 22 

The sorrow and reparation of Judson, . 23 
Timely counsel to a would-be actress, . 24 
Moral loss to play-actors themselves, . 25 
Remorse of a dying tragedian, . . . .26 
Evil transferred to its impersonator, . 27 
Figaro's opinion of the actresses' call- 
ing, 28 

The " Passion Play " of Salmi Morse, . 28 
Experience and views of J. M. Buck- 
ley, . '. 29 



PAG-- 
A formal plea for the theatre, .... 32 

The plea of respectability, 32 

Ministerial "staginess" and Sunday- 
school fiction, 33 

The legitimate stage examined, ... 31 
The stage as existing under a law of 

degeneracy, 35 

Estimate by Wesley, Tillotson, Hale, . 35 
Estimate by Wilberforce, Rousseau, 

Rush, 35 

Clarkson on Quakers and the the- 
atre, 36 

Play acting specially condemned be- 
cause of its violating the truth, ... 37 
Bernard and Rousseau against false 

frenzies, 38 

Profanity of simulated prayer, .... 39 
Elizabeth Fry renounces the theatre, . 39 

Experience of Mary Capper, 41 

Experience of Christine Majolier, . . 42 
Attending the opera gives countenance 

to the ballet, 43 

Woman's appearance on the stage did 

not reform it, 44 

The pious Nonna no theatre-goer, . . 45 
The theatre an inciter to crime, .. . . 45 
V 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The agency of pernicious literature, . 46 
Connection between juvenile pranks 

and overt crime, 48 

Juvenile masqueraders, 49 

Faithful testifying against pernicious 

literature needed, 51 

Absence of parental restraint, .... 52 

"Wise and unwise correctives, 54 

Keceiving the proceeds of theatrical 

entertainments, 55 

U. S. Congress of 1778 against the the- 
atre, 56 

Suppression of the theatre in England, 57 
Stage-playing forbidden during the 

plague 58 

The theatre uot wanted in early Penn- 
sylvania, 59 

The theatre curse in Philadelphia, . . 61 
The theatre's attraction in Berlin, . . 62 
" Sunday " theatre-going in Chicago, . 66 



PAGE 

Cincinnati and the lesson of its calami- 
ties, ' . 67 

Seriousness of the present situation, . . 70 
Hospitality versus theatre visiting, . . 71 
Responsibility of the professing 

Church 72 

Stage "mysteries" of the Middle Ages, 72 
Havergal on church ornamentation, . 74 
Holy-days occasions for excess, .... 75 

Church theatricals, 76 

The church sociable a forerunner of un- 
seemly entertainments, 79 

The Church walking with the world, . 80 
Deadening effects of these entertain- 
ments, _. .... 82 

The problem briefly stated, 83 

Three witnesses to holy fidelitv. ... 83 
Two examples to follow in dealing with 

the theatre, 84 

A safe conclusion recommenaea, ... 85 



THE THEATRE. 

It was told me by a Friend that a certain person with 
whom he was well acquainted in his younger years, hav- 
ing made an appointment to meet one of his associates 
at a theatre entrance, was so struck by the usher's itera- 
tion of " This way to the pit ! This way to the pit !" 
that, appalled at the peril to which he was exposing his 
soul, he hastily left the place, and was never afterward 
seen at such a resort. I have thought that no argu- 
ment more convincing can be offered in opposition 
to theatre-going, none more likely to impress us 
with its debasing tendency, than that which may be 
found in simply scanning the countenances and observ- 
ing the demeanor of the crowd as they' leave one of our 
play-houses of the popular sort. We are morally certain 
that these people have not " been with Jesus," that they 
have not been employed " to the glory of God," but 
rather that, walking in the way of sinners and in the 
counsel of the ungodly, they have cast in their lot with 
those who " go down into the pit." 

Now, we in the city are surrounded by multitudes of 
the frequenters of such places ; we are sure that the souls 
of these people are, in the Almighty's estimation, of 
equal value with our own, and, although as a religious 
society we have a clear testimony against the play- 
house, and our membership as a whole is nearly free 

7 



8 THE THEATRE. 

from countenancing such resorts, yet we will not have 
done our duty in this particular unless, showing our- 
selves alive to the magnitude of the evil, and following 
the counsel of the apostle Jude concerning those who 
" walk after their own ungodly lusts," we do our part in 
faithfully " pulling them out of the fire." Said the late 
William Evans in his journal (1849) : " The kingdom of 
Satan is gaining ground in this land, and if those who 
consider themselves lovers of religion slacken their 
watchfulness and their resistance to wrong things, the 
tide of compliance must gain a powerful ascendency over 
the morals of the people at large." 

It will be the scope of this essay to show the adverse 
estimation in which stage-plays have been held by the 
best of men of ancient and modern times, and how local 
communities and States have, in very self- 
defense, forbidden them; that many actors 
themselves, conceding the demoralizing character of their 
occupation, have united in condemning the plays, whilst 
others of them — apologists for the stage — have been 
unable successfully to defend, as they have likewise re- 
peatedly failed in the effort to reform, it, seeing that it 
" exists only under a law of degeneracy ;" that an invari- 
able accompaniment of stage-plays, and that which estab- 
lishes the constant trend to degeneracy, is the dissimula- 
tion and violation of truth involved in the acting ; that 
the personal experience (to be briefly detailed) of some 
righteous people of our own time is very confirming in 
that it clearly shows the wanton and unsatisfying char- 



The scope of this 
essay. 



THE THEATRE. 9 

acter of such and similar pleasures ; that an inevitable 
result of theatre-going is the corruption of youth, and, as 
consequents, law-breaking and overt crime ; but that to 
pernicious reading and to general negligence of parental 
restraint and training are to be largely referred the 
growth of these depraving tendencies ; that many of our 
American cities, following the custom of the capitals of 
Europe in tolerating stage-plays and amusements gener- 
ally on the first day of the week, are adding iniquity to 
iniquity and inviting the righteous judgments of the 
Almighty on account thereof; and finally, that the pro- 
fessing Church of our day, through countenancing (under 
cloak of religion) a great variety of worldly entertain- 
ments — as sociables, feasts, bazars, tableaux, dancing — 
has not only weakened the ancient testimony of con- 
demnation against the theatre, but by becoming in effect 
the world's ally, has made easy the way of multitudes to 
resort to it. 

An English writer of last century, Arthur Bedford* 
cites the following concerning the theatre in ancient 
Athens and Rome. Quoting from Plu- 
tarch, he says that the consequences of 
the corrupt plays in Athens were severely felt in getting 
the people's money as well as in demoralizing them ; 
that inspectors were appointed for its better regulation, 
but this plan not succeeding, a law was .enacted that 

* A Serious Remonstrance in behalf of the Christian Religion against the Horrid Blas- 
phemies and Impieties which are still used in the English Play-Houses, to the great 
dishonoring of Almighty God, and in contempt of the Statutes of this Realm. By Arthur 
Bedford. London, 1719. 



Rome and Athens 
condemn the theatre. 



IO THE THEATRE. 

common actors should be reputed infamous. At last 
the evil became so serious that the theatre was totally 
suppressed.* Bedford adds : " How, then, will they rise 
up in judgment against us and condemn us if we are 
remiss in this matter." Following Tertullian, he says : 
" When the plays were corrupted in heathen Rome, a 
very early law was made against them, in which they 
were declared infamous ; and it was enacted that no 
actor should be admitted to the Court, the Bar, or the 
Senate, and should also be incapable of any military or 
other honor or esteem : And, therefore, when God enters 
into judgment for these things, will it not be more tol- 
erable for them than it will be for us ?" 

" The Lacedaemonians," says Collier,f also on the 
authority of Plutarch, " were remarkable for the wisdom 
of their laws, the sobriety of their manners, and their 
breeding of brave men — this government would not 
endure the stage in any form nor under any regulation." 

The citizens of ancient Marseilles, we are told, would 
admit no stage-plays into their city, lest their filthiness 
should corrupt their youth. 

Xenophon, Seneca, Tacitus, Plato, Ovid, were among 
the noted Greeks and Romans who raised their voices 

* " When tragedy and comedy were first enacted at Athens, they were soon abolished 
by public authority as being enervating ; and among the Romans, so cautious were they 
of permitting them to be frequent, that a theatre, when occasionally erected, was not 
allowed to continue above a prescribed number of days." — Witherspoon. 

It may be added that, upon the score of public morality, the first stone theatre among 
the Romans was pulled down when nearly finished, B. C. 155. 

f A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage: together 
with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument. By Jeremy Collier. London, 1698. 



Stage plays not tol- 
erated by the Primi- 
tive Christians. 



THE THEATRE. II 

against the theatre as a school of vice, a corrupter of 
youth, and the disgrace of those nations. And when 
theatrical shows were introduced by Herod into Jeru- 
salem, Josephus spoke of them in strong terms of repro- 
bation, as " tending to corrupt the morals of the Jewish 
nation, to bring the people into love with Pagan idolatry, 
and to throw contempt on the law of Moses." 

Respecting the belief and general practice of the Primi- 
tive Christians hereupon, Milner, the Church historian, 
testifies : " A Christian renouncing the pomps and vani- 
ties of this wicked world, and yet fre- 
quenting the play-house, was, with the 
Christians of the first three centuries, a 
solecism. The effusion of the Holy Spirit, during those 
centuries, never admitted those amusements at all." . 

A well-known but somewhat rare work against stage- 
plays is Edward Prynne's Histrio Mastix, a book of more 
than one thousand pages, which was published in Lon- 
don in the time of Charles the Second (1663). It is a 
treatise of invaluable authority on the subject. The fol- 
lowing are some of this writer's citations from the early 
Christian fathers in opposition to the theatre : 

Tertullian : " Stage plays are the pomps of the devil, 
against which we have renounced in our baptism." He 
also styles the play-house " the devil's church." 

Clement, of Rome, calls stage-plays " the pomps oi 
idols and spectacles of the devil," and hence strenuously 
cautions all Christians to shun and avoid them. 

Cyril, of Jerusalem : " The devil's pomp which we 



12 THE THEATRE. 

renounce in baptism are those spectacles or plays in 
theatres, and all other vanities of this kind from which 
the holy man of God, desiring to be freed, saith, — ' Turn 
away mine eyes from beholding vanity.' " 

Augustine gives them the same titles as the foregoing, 
and decries the faithlessness of professing Christians in 
" going one while into the church to pray, and after 
awhile running to the play-house to cry out impudently 
with stage-players." 

Chrysostom, the eloquent preacher, is very outspoken, 
calling stage-plays "the impure food of the devil," and 
play-houses his conventicles, and so zealous was he 
against them that he avers (perhaps too confidently) : " I 
will never give over preaching until I have dissipated 
and rent asunder [this theatre-going] ; that so the as- 
sembly of the Church may be made pure and clean, freed 
from its present nlthiness, and enjoy eternal life here- 
after, by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ their Lord." 

Salvian, Bishop of Marseilles, says of theatre-goers 
who have embraced the new faith — " Thou hast once 
renounced the devil and his spectacles, and by this thou 
must needs know that thou dost return to the devil, when 
thou dost wittingly and knowingly return to stage-plays." 

" The true soldiers of Christ," says Bernard, " reject 
and abominate players and stage-plays, as vanities and 
false frenzies." 

Prynne quotes still others, the foremost writers among 
the early Christians and those of the centuries immedi- 
ately succeeding, as Cyprian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Basil, 



THE THEATRE. I 3 

etc., as well as the deliberate acts of fifty-four General, 
National, and Provincial Councils, ancient and modern, 
all bearing unequivocal testimony against plays and play- 
houses as being Satan's own. Hence, summing up the 
testimony gathered from the primitive period of the 
Christian Church, our author says : " We have the 
express testimony of sundry Fathers and Councils, that 
all the godly Christians in the Primitive Church did 
wholly withdraw themselves from stage-plays ; that all 
those Pagans who either acted or frequented plays, did 
immediately upon their conversion to the Christian faith, 
and their very first admittance into the Church of Christ, 
ever publicly renounce all future acting or resort to plays ; 
and that none but Pagans, unchaste, profane, and grace- 
less persons, who were cast out of the Church by public 
censures, did use to flock unto them." 

Having thus pursued the subject, more exhaustively 
perhaps than any other writer, Prynne gives his views 
upon reforming the stage, in the following plainly 
expressed and eloquent conclusion : 

" Many are the laws which have been enacted ; much 
the care that hath been taken by sundry states and cen- 
sors in all ages to lop off the enormities, allay the poison, 
purge out the filth and gross corruptions of these stage- 
plays, and so to reduce them to a laud- 
able and inoffensive use: but yet these 
Ethiopians still retain their black infernal hue; these 
vipers keep their soul-devouring poison still; these 
Augean stables are as polluted (yea, more defiled) now, 



Prynne upon 
forming the stage, 



14 THE THEATRE. 

as ever Heretofore : no art, no age, no nation could ever 
yet abridge, much less reform, their exorbitant corrup- 
tions and enormities ; their hurt doth far transcend their 
good ; their abuses far overpoise their use ; they are so 
crooked and distorted in themselves, that no art can make 
them straight; there is no other means left to reform 
them, but utterly to abolish them." 

Leaving Prynne, who (as said before) wrote in the time 
of the profligate Charles the Second and his dissolute 
court, let us consult the views upon theatre-going of one 
who, upward of a century later, made careful examination 
of the subject : I allude to the excellent Hannah More. 
The possessor, as was thought, of some dramatic talent, 
she was introduced to the celebrated actor Garrick, with 
a view to her going upon the stage ; but becoming con- 
vinced of the demoralizing character of the pursuit, she 
happily relinquished her purpose. This discerning woman, 
in adducing the testimony of the Holy Scriptures and of 
the unflattering witness within, remarks : 

" I would take leave of those amiable and not ill-dis- 
posed young persons who complain of the rigor of human 
prohibitions, and declare ' they meet with no such strict- 
ness in the gospel/ by asking them with the most affec- 
tionate earnestness, if they can conscientiously reconcile 
their nightly attendance at every public 
place which they frequent, with such 
precepts as the following : ' Redeeming the time ' — 
■ Watch and pray ' — ' Watch, for ye know not at what 
time your Lord cometh ' — ' Abstain from all appearance 



Testimony of Han 
nah More. 



THE THEATRE. 



15 



of evil ' — ' Set your affections on things above ' — ' Be ye 
spiritually minded ' — ' Crucify the flesh with its affections 
and lusts.' And I would venture to offer one criterion 
by which the persons in question may be enabled to 
decide on the positive innocence and safety of such 
diversions ; I mean, provided they are sincere in their 
scrutiny and honest in their avowal. If, on their return 
at night from these places they find they can retire and 
1 commune with their own hearts ;' if they can ' bring 
every thought into subjection,' and concentrate every 
wandering imagination, if they can soberly examine into 
their own state of mind : I do not say, if they can do all 
this perfectly and without distraction (for who can do 
this at any time ?) but, if they can do it with the same 
degree of seriousness, pray with the same degree of fervor, 
and renounce the world in as great a measure as at other 
times ; and if they can lie down with a peaceful conscious- 
ness of having avoided in the evening that ' temptation ' 
which they had prayed not to be ' led into ' in the morn- 
ing, they may then more reasonably hope that all is well, 
and that they are not speaking false peace in their hearts. 
"Again, if we cannot beg the blessing of our Maker 
on whatever we are going to do or to enjoy, is it not an 
unequivocal proof that the thing ought not to be done 
or enjoyed ? On all the rational enjoyments of society,, on 
all healthful and temperate exercise, on the delights of 
friendship, arts, and polished letters, on the exquisite 
pleasures resulting from the enjoyment of rural scenery 
and the beauties of nature ; on the innocent participation 



!& THE THEATRE. 

of these we may ask the divine favor — for the sober 
enjoyment of these we may thank the divine benefi- 
cence ; but do we feel equally disposed to invoke bless- 
ings or return praises for gratifications found (to say no 
worse) in levity, in vanity, and waste of time ? If these 
tests were fairly used ; if these experiments were honestly 
tried ; if these examinations were conscientiously made, 
may we not without offense presume to ask — Could our 
numerous places of public resort, could our ever-multi- 
plying scenes of more select but not less dangerous 
diversion, nightly overflow with an excess hitherto unpar- 
alleled in the annals of pleasure ?" 

Next, in regard to the stage being a school of morals, 
as some have vainly claimed, John Witherspoon, President 
of Princeton College, wrote as follows in his Serious 
Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage. 

" If the stage be a proper method of promoting the 
interests of religion, then is Satan's kingdom divided 
against itself, which he is more cunning than to suffer it 
to be. For whatever debate there be, whether good men 
may attend the theatre, there can be no question at all 
that no openly vicious man is an enemy 
to it, and that the far greater part 
of them do passionately love it. Nothing is more certain 
than that, taking the world according to its appear- 
ance, it is the worse part of it that shows most passion 
for this entertainment, and the best that avoids and fears 
it, than which there can hardly be a worse sign of it as a 
means of doing good." 



The stage not a 
school of morals. 



THE THEATRE. 1 7 

This assumption of moral teaching on behalf of the 
stage is controverted in an essay against plays issued by 
the Jansenists of Port Royal about the beginning of last 
century. They say : 

" It is so true that plays are almost always a represen- 
tation of vicious passions, that the most part of Christian 
virtues are incapable of appearing upon the stage. Silence, 
patience, moderation, poverty, repentance, are no virtues 
the representation of which can divert the spectators ; 
and above all, we never hear humility spoken of, and the 
bearing of injuries. It would be strange to see a modest 
and silent religious person represented. There must be 
something great and renowned according to men, or at 
least something lively and animated, which is not met 
withal in Christian gravity and wisdom ; and therefore, 
those who have been desirous to introduce holy men and 
women upon the stage have been forced to make them 
appear proud, and to make them utter discourses more 
proper for the ancient Roman heroes than for saints and 
martyrs."/ 

To recur again to Prynne — he also says, respecting 
stage-plays teaching virtues : " But I never yet could 
hear or read of any ancient or modern actor, composer, 
or spectator of any theatrical interludes whom plays 
recalled from the love, the practice of any vices, that 
were ever acted on the stage, whereas they have drawn 
millions to imitate them." 

It may now be instructive to give ear to the " sober 
second thought " of some of the play-actors themselves. 



1 8 THE THEATRE. 

Colley Cibber, for forty years an actor, has this to re- 
mark concerning his occupation. Writing in the time 
of Queen Anne, he says : " While vice and farcical folly 
are the most profitable commodities, why should we 
Testimony of play- wonder that, time out of mind, the poor. 

actors-Colley Cibber comedian when real vice could bear no 
price should deal in what would bring him most ready 
money ? But this, you will say, is making the stage a 
nursery of vice and folly, or at least keeping an open 
shop for it. / grant it" In an epilogue composed by 
Dr. Johnson, and spoken by Cibber's successor, Garrick, 
at the re-opening of Drury Lane Theatre upon a pro- 
fessedly reformed basis, there occurs this sentiment : 



I 



" Ah ! let not censure term our fate our choice. 
The stage but echoes back the public voice ; 
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, 
For we that live. to please must please to live." 



Dumas. 



Dumas, who wrote Camille, said : " You do not take 
your daughter to see my play. You are right. Let me 
say once for all, you must not take your 
daughter to the theatre. It is not merely 
the work that is immoral, it is the place. Whenever we 
paint men, there must be a grossness that cannot be 
placed before all eyes ; and whenever the theatre is 
elevated and loyal, it can live only by using the color of 
truth. The theatre being the picture or satire of the 
passions and social manners, it must be immoral — the 
passions and social manners themselves being immoral." 
Edwin Booth, in a letter to the Christian Union, says : " I 



Edwin Booth. 



Macready and 

Knowles. 



THE THEATRE. 1 9 

never permit my wife or daughter to witness a play with- 
out previously ascertaining its character, f * * While 
the theatre is permitted to be a mere I 
shop for gain, open to every huckster of | 
immoral gimcracks, there is no other way to discriminate 
between the pure and base than through the experience 
of others." AjThis E. Booth, in his vain attempt to reform 
the stage, lost a fortune.) W.* C. Macready, another 
noted actor, said : " None of my children shall ever, with 
my consent, or on any pretence, enter a theatre, or have 
any visiting connection with actors or 
actresses." Sheridan Knowles, once a 
successful playwright and actor, having become a Chris- 
tian, renounced the stage as utterly evil, and devoted the 
remainder of his life to preaching the Gospel. 

Says Theodore L. Cuyler, writing on the Peidls of the 
Play-House : " One of the most celebrated actresses of 
this time informed a friend of mine that she ' only enters 
a theatre to enact her part, and has very little conversa- 
tion with her own profession.' A converted actor once 
said to me while passing a play-house in which he had 
often performed, — ' Behind those curtains lies Sodom.' 
Although sorely pressed to return to his old pursuits, he 
said he would sooner starve than go on the stage again. 
These men certainly knew whereof they affirmed." 
f Of play-acting, the actress Siddons says that it is a 
business " unworthy of a woman." Frances Kemble, in 
her Reminiscences of the Stage — a recent installment 
of which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly — gives the 



THE THEATRE. 



KembleandSiddons. 



subjoined striking testimony. Describing her first ap- 
pearance on the stage, she says : 

" So my life was determined, and I devoted myself to 
an avocation which I never liked or honored, and about 
the very nature of which I have never been able to come to 
a decided opinion. It is in vain that the undoubted speci- 
fic gifts of great actors and actresses suggest that all gifts 
are given for rightful exercise ; in vain that Shakespeare's 
plays urge the imperative claim to the 
most perfect illustration they can receive 
from histrionic interpretation : a business which is inces- 
sant excitement and factitious emotion seems to me un- 
worthy of man ; a business which is public exhibition is 
unworthy of a woman." * * " Never," she further 
says, " have I presented myself before an audience with- 
out a shrinking feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from 
their presence without thinking the excitement I had 
undergone unhealthy and the personal exhibition 
odious." 

In endeavoring to account (after her public appearance 
at Drury Lane) for the origin of the deep impression 
that she had entertained as to the moral dangers of the 
life upon which she was then entering — for, she says, 
this fearfulness certainly came not from her parents, who 
seemed not to have been troubled with any moral repug- 
nance to their calling — she proceeds : " I had never 
heard the nature of it discussed, and was absolutely 
without experience of it ; but the vapid vacuity of the 
last years of my aunt Siddons' life had made a profound 



THE THEATRE. 



impression upon me — her apparent deadness and indiffer- 
ence to everything, which I attributed (unjustly perhaps) 
less to her advanced age than to what I supposed the 
withering and drying influence of the over-stimulating 
atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in 
which she had passed her life ; certain it is that such was 
my dread of the effect of my profession upon me that I 
added an earnest petition to my daily prayers that I 
might be defended from the evil influences I feared might 
be exercised upon me." 
/ Montague Stanley, an English actor of note, became so 
convinced of the sinfulness of the stage that, for con- 
science' sake, he relinquished it, and that at a time when 
he was considered to be one of the most 
rising men in his profession. In the 
midst of the popular applause his mind 
had been ill at ease, so that, finally, God's grace leading 
him to a true discernment of the way he had been tread- 
ing and the privilege of giving up all for Christ, he was 
enabled to make this entry in his journal : — " April 28. 
Last night of my dramatic career ; and now, thanks be 
to the Lord, who hath called me from darkness to light, 
I am emancipated from a most ungodly profession. 
May the Lord bless and prosper me in my new one." 
Later he said, as to the peril and guilt of the theatre fre- 
quenters : " They are leading others by their example to 
do as they are doing, and they are verily guilty of their 
brother's blood when he falls into the snare of ungodli- 
ness and is taken. They are upholding a system of 



Dispassionate testi- 
mony of Montague 
Stanley. 



2 2 THE THEATRE. 

enormous wickedness. It is useless for any person to 
say that the theatre would go on whether he paid his 
money or not. It would not go on if it were deserted by 
the audience. Every individual, then, who contributes a 
fraction at the door of a theatre for admission is a par- 
taker with all those sitting around him in the common 
sin of supporting a vast machinery of corruption." 

Not less convincing than the above is the (late) 
changed experience and the testimony of one of our own 
countrymen, who for more than twenty years followed 
the stage in the various characters of clown, minstrel, 
and regular play-actor. Having seen the folly of, and 
abandoned his former occupation, he has been much 
occupied during the past three years in calling others 
from the evil of their way, with the result that quite 
a number of stage-players have aban- 
doned the pursuit and turned to more 
morally-profitable engagements. At a lecture given 
some months ago in the city of New York he gave a 
sketch of his life, in which he pointed out from his own 
experience that " the way of the transgressor is hard." 
Blessed with a good Christian home — the remembrance 
of which never left him in all the years of his wandering 
— he confessed, nevertheless, that often, after his mother 
had given him her " good-night kiss " and supposed he 
was asleep, he would dress himself and steal out of the 
house to go to the theatre — so strong had become his 
infatuation for the play. 

Referring to the way in which professing Christians 



A changed American 
actor. 






THE THEATRE. 23 

turn their backs upon the Master in this matter — fre- 
quenting the play-house and siding with the enemies of 
truth and righteousness — he said : " I have stood by the 
footlights many a night and recognized in the audience 
Christian men by whose side I had sat in church. You 
all know the influence of such conduct upon the young. 
And not only young men, but old gray-haired men ap- 
pear in those places nightly ; and, though not a Christian, 
I have blushed again and again to see Christian (?) men 
laughing at and applauding scenes of vice and vulgarity." 
Concluding, he said he could not understand how any 
man who has given his heart to Christ can enter those 
gateways to hell, and he knew actors who are longing to 
get away from the influences that surround them and 
the bonds that hold them to the stage. 

When Dr. Judson was attending college he imbibed 
the poison of unbelief, so that the truths and the comforts 
of the Christian religion became (apparently) of no value 
to him. Leaving college, he came to New York upon 
the special errand of acquainting himself thoroughly with 
theatrical life in case he should conclude 
to adopt dramatic authorship as his pro- 
fession. For this purpose he attached 
himself to a company of strolling players, leading, for 
awhile, a reckless, vagabond life, and, as opportunity 
offered, running up a score and departing without pay- 
ing. His subsequent sorrow for this disgraceful episode 
of his life was so poignant, that before sailing for Burmah 
he could only find rest by an attempt at reparation. 



Judson a strolling- 
p'ayer-His sorrow 
and reparation. 



Timely counsel to a 
would-be actress. 



24 THE THEATRF. 

He says : " Before leaving America, when the enormity 
of this vicious course rested with a depressing weight on 
my mind, I made a second tour over the same ground, 
carefully making amends to all whom I had injured." 

The following instructive circumstance, illustrating 
the good accompanying a "word in season," has been fur- 
nished the writer: As a Friend, a minister, was walking the 
street in a low state of mind, he became conscious that 
a young woman was walking by his side. She addressed 
him by saying that her father, a general residing in a 
Southern State, had so high an esteem for the Quakers 
that she felt impelled to speak to him as one of them. 
Entering into conversation, the Friend 
found that, at the persuasion of some 
of her friends who thought she would succeed as an 
actress, she had come to Philadelphia to prepare 
to appear upon the stage, and was then taking 
lessons in elocution for that purpose. The Friend, ex- 
pressing his sorrow, said he had read that " they that 
turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for 
ever and ever," but there was no such promise recorded 
for those who were instrumental in leading others to the 
brink of the pit of destruction, as would probably be her 
experience if she carried out her plans. Some days or 
weeks after, she came to the place of business of her 
faithful counselor and told him that the words he had 
uttered had remained constantly with her, and that she 
had now determined to give up her project and return 
to her father, who had never approved of her scheme. 



THE THEATRE. 



25 



Moral loss to the 
play-actors them- 
selves. 



/ A gay young lady was once expatiating upon the 
varied pleasures attendant upon theatre-going — the 
pleasures of anticipation, with that of seeing and hearing, 
and also of recollecting the scene — when a godly man 
observed, " Madam, there is one pleasure you have for- 
gotten." " What is that ?" queried the lady. " The 
pleasure of remembering it on your dying bed." 

In speaking of the perils of the play-house, it is there- 
fore not alone the imminent danger to the attenders 
which has to be considered, but also, as just intimated, 
the moral loss — frequently the overwhelming moral loss 
— which is sure to accrue to die players 
themselves. I will introduce this aspect 
of the subject by quoting the following 
brief paragraph concerning a widely known American 
actor who died not many years ago, premising the quo- 
tation with the remark that the words were written by a 
friendly hand and that the glimpse they give of the inner 
life of this actor of note is doubtless not unlike that of 
very many who live by the stage : 

" His habitual mood was one of levity. He loved and 
trusted but very few persons. It suited his humor to jest 
and to seek excitement and distraction; first, because 
his temperament naturally bloomed in a frolic atmos- 
phere, and then because he wished to suppress melan- 
choly feelings and a gloomy proneness to self-reproach 
and saddening introspection. In his domestic life he 
was unfortunate ; and he lived to learn — as all do who 
depart from innocence — that the wrong that is done to 
the affections can never be righted on earth." 



26 THE THEATRE. 

An actor of eminence was performing before a large 
audience the leading part in a startling tragedy which 
was represented as ending in the hero's death. Though 
in a decline, he did his part so well that thunders of ap- 
plause followed the curtain's fall. The effort, however, 
had been too much for the actor's strength, so that he 
lingered in life a few days only. When told that there 
was no hope for him, a terrible despair settled upon his 
Remorse of a dying countenance. Grasping the physician's 

tragedian. wrist> he cried Qut . « Q> g , ^ thea _ 

tre may do for us to live by, but, oh ! it will not do to 
die by. We have all sinned against the Lord our God — 
but be sure our sins will find us out."/ With these words 
upon his lips the wretched man expired, but the physi- 
cian never forgot the thrilling words which confessed the 
mockery of the play-house, nor the convulsive grasp 
which seemed as though it would tear aside the mask of 
its hollowness and gay delusion. 

A writer upon the theatre has tersely said: "The good 
self of the actor's personality must for the time being be 
lost in the evil self of the character acted. And what 
an effect is this ! The greater the actor, the completer 
the transference of self and the profounder the evil !" 
To illustrate this, he cites the following description by a 
noted authoress, a novelist, of the manner in which the 
"hellish transformation" appeared to possess an equally 
celebrated actress when performing her part in a certain 
tragedy. 

" For a while — a long while — I thought it was only a 



Evil transferred to 
its impersonator. 



THE THEATRE. 27 

woman, though a unique woman, who moved in might 
and grace before this multitude. By and by I recognized 
my mistake. Behold ! I found upon 
her something neither of woman nor of 
man : in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces 
bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength 
— for she was but a frail creature ; and as the action rose 
and the story deepened, how wildly they shook her with 
the passions of the pit ! They wrote Hell on her straight, 
haughty brow. They turned her voice to the note of 
torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac 
mask. Hate and murder and madness incarnate, she 
stood." I think it will be admitted that such power or 
genius for Satanic transformation is all too dearly 
acquired. 

A recent English writer computes that one of the most 
widely known of English actors — one who is a champion 
for the reformation of the stage — has committed at least 
fifteen thousand murders upon the theatre's boards ; that 
another has been divorced nearly three thousand times 
on the stage ; and others (named) in the personation of 
sundry stage characters have been some thousands of 
times " foully betrayed, deserted, or abducted." Hence, 
we may with pertinency ask, whether it can be possible 
for the moral nature of the portrayers of these terrible 
offenses to pass, even measurably, uncontaminated 
through all this evil simulation. 

A London serial {Echoes from Paris) published in the 
interest of Christian work in the French capital, refers to 



Figaro's opinion of 
the actresses' calling. 



28 THE THEATRE. 

the opening of a Home for " respectable English ballet- 
girls in Paris," and prints from the well-known journal, 
Figaro, some remarks by one of the editors of the latter 
upon the actresses' calling. This writer shows that the 
public concerns itself not at all as to the effect of stage 
acting upon those whose paid occupation it is to please: 
" It wants to laugh or to cry, often both 
at once; and it does not trouble itself f 
about the consequences. * * * To be a really clever 
performer, and very few are such, the various passions of 
a woman's nature cannot be represented by one who has 
not felt them. If I do not express an absolute fact, it is 
at least remarkable that the lives of all the great actresses 
have been full of intrigues ; and it may even be said that 
the greater they were, the freer the life they led. The 
history of the theatre, from its origin to our own times, 
tends to prove this." 

It will serve to point the moral of this part of my sub- 
ject if I advert to the tragic end of the playwright, Salmi 
Morse, an event which happened while these notes were 
in preparation. Repeatedly defeated in his purpose of 
having the " Passion Play " performed before a New York 
audience — for both the public at large and the judicial 
authorities had declared it to be a subject 
without the pale of scenic representation 
— overwhelmed with debt, and filled with a remorse which 
led him to wish that the Almighty would put an end to his 
unhappy life, he at last cast himself into the Hudson (some 



The "Passion Play 
of Salmi Morse. 



THE THEATRE 29 

said the hand of an enemy pushed him in) and thus per- 
ished miserably.* 

It is surely not necessary to multiply condemnatory 
testimony such as that which has been given, coming as 
it in part does from those who have been, or who now 
are, enabled to speak from dearly earned experience. 
We will turn next — it may be hoped with profit — to 
something said in defense of the stage, being the separate 
comments of three writers — actors, playwrights, or stage- 
managers — upon a brief arraignment of the theatre by J. 
M. Buckley, editor of the Methodist Christian Advocate \ 
of New York City. The four articles are printed in con- 
nection, in the North American Review for the Sixth 
month, 1883. 

Some extracts from J. M. Buckley's paper will be first 
in order. Giving in a few lines his own experience, he 
says : " The writer in the most susceptible period of his 
life was fascinated by the theatre. The time was short, 
but the fever ran high, and during his attendance he saw 
some of the most noted actors who have appeared during 
the last thirty years, a few of whom are 
still in the front ranks of their profession. 
The sneers at religion and straight-laced bigots which 
certain comedies contained embittered him toward a life 

* "And because the piously introduced custom of representing to the people the ven- 
erable passion of Christ the Lord, and the glorious combats of martyrs and acts of the 
saints, is brought to such a pass by the perverseness of men that it is an offense to many, 
and likewise a matter of much derision and contempt to many: we therefore decree, that 
from henceforth the passion of our Saviour be no more acted neither in any sacred nor 
profane place, but that it be learnedly and gravely declared by the preachers in such sort 
as tbat they may stir up piety and tears in the auditors." — Council of Milan, A . D. 1560- 



Experience and 
views of J.M.Buckley. 



30 THE THEATRE. 

of piety. The excitement of the evening unfitted him for 
the serious pursuit of his business. He lost relish for 
lectures and solid reading;, a semi-tragical extravagance 
with an infusion of comical slang, affected his action and 
expression ; while the company he found there was such 
as to destroy all interest in the society of steady 
persons." 

Following prior writers on the topic, J. M. Buckley 
shows that, inasmuch as the success of a theatrical enter- 
tainment depends upon its power to excite attention and 
kindle strong emotion, it is any or all of the long array of 
evil dispositions and wickednesses which find such ready 
representation, and not, or rarely not, the quiet virtues of 
" truth, honesty, temperance, industry, frugality, chastity, 
religion," which are not readily representable on the 
stage so as to satisfy the sense of high excitement which 
is clamored for. The witticisms will be vulgar or 
broadly indecent, while the attitude assumed and the 
general behavior of those engaged in acting out the 
vices will be broadly at variance with that Christian 
decorum and sobriety of demeanor to which every one 
is called. 

" The result," he continues, " of an examination of 
more than sixty of the plays which have been performed 
in the principal theatres of New York within recent years 
— copies prepared for the use of the actors being used — 
shows that if language and sentiments which would not 
be tolerated among respectable people in private inter- 
course, and would excite indignation if addressed to the 



THE THEATRE. 31 

most uncultivated and coarse servant-girl, not openly 
vicious, by an ordinary young man, and profaneness 
which would brand him who uttered it as irreligious, are 
improper amusements for the young and for Christians 
of every age, at least fifty of the sixty plays above re- 
ferred to must be condemned." He gives some details 
of the plots of several of them, but it will suffice merely 
to cite what he says in brief of two of the public's favorite 

dramas, that " consists of infidelity, adultery, murder, 

re-marriage, and the subsequent re-appearance of the 
first wife to die in the house of her former husband. 

is a succession of hypocrisy, covetousness, drinking, 

gambling, jealousy, and infidelity, tending to impart a 
view of life to the young which, if taken as true, would 
lead to distrust, misanthropy, and personal recklessness." 

Hence, the above writer sees no probability of a re- 
formation of the stage, because its reform has been called 
for for centuries and never been accomplished, it having 
always existed under conditions which forbid the hope of 
reform; the same morbid demand for delineation of vice 
continues ; and finally, as the pecuniary success of the 
play is of the first moment to the playwright and mana- 
ger, and as "nine-tenths of the theatre-going public call 
for the present order of plays, they will get what they 
call for or the management must fail." 

To this serious arraignment, the first of the theatre 
defenders, replying, is frank enough to say that the pres- 
ent condition of the drama is " a subject for regret," and 
that many of the plays " are open to the severest criti- 



32 - THE THEATRE. 

cism," yet he thinks that there has been some noticea- 
ble improvement, and " that the attitude of the Christian 
public generally is much more liberal toward the theatre 

A formal plea for | anc * theatrical people than [formerly], and 
the theatre. j ^^ ac j- ors as g^fr are no t now excluded 

from good society on account of their calling," — an as- 
severation which (if correct) can hardly be received as 
hopefully indicating the right estimation of this pursuit 
by the professing Church. He further asserts that, it 
being the province of the stage to amuse and instruct, 
vice is indeed exhibited to the intent that goodness may 
thereby be taught by comparison : surely a dangerous 
position to hold, and such as no concerned parent would 
bring forward as an excuse for having permitted his sons 
to seek the companionship of profane and immoral 
boys. 

The second theatre defender takes a more hopeful view 
of stage morals, and claims that "the attendance is of a 
more refined class and far larger than it ever was before" 
— a claim, as to the latter part, which, though unhappily 
too true, proves nothing as to the righteousness of the 
thing pleaded for. And though it be said that the Eng- 
lish sovereign herself gives countenance 
to the stage, and has chosen to take un- 
der her special patronage the writer of the play of " Pin- 
afore," yet how sorrowful the reflection that the Queen's 
youngest son, the late Prince Leopold, came to his end 
(if the cable dispatch be correct) in a theatre after attend- 
ance at a ball, and that the intelligence reached his oldest 



The plea of re- 
spectability. 



THE THEATRE. 33 

brother, the Prince of Wales — a notorious theatre-goer 
—when the latter was present at a race-course. Neither 
regal nor refined society can elevate the ball and the 
theatre above the low plane where the Bible places 
them^y 

In stating that some of the most violent enemies of the 
stage are those whose sermons are rather acted than 
preached, whose dissertations are "often greeted with 
unseemly laughter and applause, and their salaries are 
regulated by the success they achieve in drawing audi- 
ences," this writer conveys a reproof which it were well 
that some who claim to be prophets of the Most High 
should heed. Further, in giving expres- 
sion to the opinion that the stage does 
no more than is done by works of fiction in showing up 
wickedness, he only places the two in that near connec- 
tion which Friends have always claimed that they occu- 
pied; and this point is emphasized when he alludes to 
the character of some of the fiction to be found in " Sun- 
day-school ". libraries. Here, too, are stumbling-blocks 
which the professing Church of Christ ought speedily to 
remove. 

The last of these apologists for the stage makes much 
of the forbearance of playwrights and stage performers 
in not " showing up " clergymen of proved wickedness 
as they deserve to be, arguing from thence that theat- 
rical representations and the actors therein should be 
handled with corresponding lenity. It seems scarcely 
worth while to follow this pleader's argument, for he, 



Ministerial " stagi- 
ness" and Sunday- 
schooi fiction. 



The legitimate 
Stage examined. 



34 THE THEATRE. 

like Cibber and Garrick, would defend the acknowledged 
immoralities of the stage upon the ground of their presen- 
tation being the fault of the public in clamoring for plays of 
the most debasing sort. Nevertheless, when he discourses 
of the high intellectual standard and pure moral condition 
of the "legitimate" stage, instancing a 
theatre in this city where " the stage took 
excellent shape," I am enabled specifically to reply (citing 
a memorandum of some years since, which it now seems 
singular to me that I should have made) — " It was pub- 
licly stated a few weeks ago that a play had just been en- 
acted at the theatre of first repute in this city which, some 
years ago, the censors of even the city of Paris refused 
to license." Clearly it cannot be safe to follow the way 
of these easy advisers and defenders of that which is in- 
defensible, who may have need, above many, to consider 
the Scripture caution that " he that diggeth a pit shall 
fall into it, and whoso breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall 
bite him." 

One of the latest essays upon the theatre is an eighty- 
two page tractate entitled " Plain Talks about the Thea- 
tre," by the Presbyterian minister, Herrick Johnson. The 
writer gives a brief historical account of the stage, show- 
ing how the law of deterioration as to dramatic represen- 
tations found illustration in the case of the Greeks, 
Romans, and Hindoos, and afterward, with respect to the 
modern European and American stage, which had its 
rise during the middle ages. Humbling to our claim to 
superior civilization and morals is his affirmation that 



The stage, as ex- 
isting " under a law 
of degeneracy." 



THE THEATRE. 35 

neither in China nor Japan are women allowed to per- 
form. H. Johnson also shows how the several attempts 
at reformation of the theatre in England 
and America have signally failed, the 
efforts being spasmodic and rendered 
nugatory by the popular demand for dramas of the sen- 
sational and better-paying character; and he hence 
concludes that, " supported by the record of the past and 
present, by the very nature of theatrical representations, 
and by the necessities of the case, the stage, as an insti- 
tution, lias within itself the seeds of corruption, and exists 
only under a law of degeneracy!' 

Confirming his assertion as to the vileness of the very 
large majority of stage plays by specific references to the 
plots of a number of the most popular, we are fully pre- 
pared to conclude, with Wesley, that the theatre is " the sink 
of all profaneness and debauchery," or, with Archbishop 
Tillotson, that it is " the devil's chapel, a nursery of licen- 
tiousness and vice." Vehement in his op- 
position to the theatre was that eminent 
jurist, Sir Matthew Hale; Wilberforce 
was equally its foe ; whilst even the infidel Rousseau is 
found exclaiming, " Where would be the prudent mother 
who would dare to carry her daughter to this dangerous 
school ? and what respectable woman would not think 
herself dishonored by going there ? " To which I add 
this faithful denunciation of our Dr. Rush : " I will 
never publish to the world by going to the theatre 
that I think Jesus Christ is a hard master and religion 



Estimate by Wesley, 
Tillotson, Hale, Wil- 
berforce, Rousseau, 
and Rush. 



$6 THE THEATRE. 

an unsatisfying portion, which I should do if I went to 
the devil's ground in qUest of happiness."* 

It may be now pertinent to say something concerning 
the views of our own religious Society upon this subject. 
Thomas Clarkson, an Episcopalian, having given in ex- 
tenso, in his " Portraiture of Quakerism," the reasons why 
the Friends condemn the theatre, sums up the argument 
as follows : 

" Here we are taught that though dramatic pieces had 
no censurable origin, the best of the ancient moralists 
condemned them. We are taught that, even in the most 
favorable light in which we can view them, they have 
been thought objectionable; that is, that where they 
have pretended to teach morality, they 
have inculcated rather the virtue of 
heathenism than the strict, though mild, morality of the 
Gospel; and where they have attempted to extirpate 
vice, they have done it rather by making it appear ridic- 
ulous, than by teaching men to avoid it as evil or for 
the love of virtue. We are taught that, as it is our duty 
to love our neighbor and to be solicitous for his spiritual 
welfare, we ought not, under a system which requires 
simplicity and truth, to encourage him to be what he is 
not, or to personate a character which is not his own. 
We are taught that it is the general tendency of the 
diversions of the stage, by holding out false morals and 

*To an excellent tract styled " Can I Attend the Theatre? " by A. L. O. W. , pub- 
lished by the American Tract Society, and well-adapted for general circulation, I am 
indebted for the above quotations and some other matter which occurs in this essay. 



Clarkson on Quak- 
ers and the Theatre 



THE THEATRE. 37 

prospects, to weaken the sinews of morality; by disquali- 
fying for domestic enjoyments, to wean from a love of 
home; by accustoming to light thoughts and violent 
excitements of the passions, to unfit for the pleasures of 
religion. We are taught that diversions of this nature 
particularly fascinate, and that if they fascinate they sug- 
gest repetitions. And, finally, we are taught that the 
early Christians on their conversion, though before this 
time they had followed them as among the desirable 
pleasures of their lives, relinquished them on the princi- 
ples now explained." 

Upon the single point as to dissimulation and opposi- 
tion to truth which stage-acting involves — a very import- 
ant point, indeed, because " without " the eternal city are 
" whosoever loveth and maketh a lie " — I quote from 
Clarkson's argument in full : 

" They [the Friends] hold it also to be contrary to the 
spirit of Christianity. For men who personate charac- 
ters in this way express joy and grief when in reality 
there may be none of these feelings in their hearts. They 
express noble sentiments, when their whole lives may 
have been remarkable for their meanness, 
and go often afterward and wallow in 
sensual delights. They personate the 
virtuous character to-day, and perhaps to-morrow that of 
the rake, and, in the latter case, they utter his profligate 
sentiments and speak his profane language. Now Chris- 
tianity requires simplicity and truth. It allows no man 
to pretend to be what he is not ; and it requires great 



Play-acting speci- 
ally condemned be- 
cause of its violating 
the truth. 



38 THE THEATRE. 

circumspection of its followers with respect to what they 
may utter, because it makes every man accountable for 
his idle words. The Quakers, therefore, are of opinion 
that they cannot, as men either professing Christian 
tenets or Christian love, encourage others to assume false 
characters or to personate those which are not their 
own." 

In another place Clarkson says respecting the Friends 
of his day: "I know of no people who regard trutJi 
more than the Quakers. Their whole system leads and 
directs, to truth. One of the peculiarities of their lan- 
guage, or their rejection of many of the words which 
other people use — because they consider them as not re- 
ligiously appropriate to the objects of which they are the 
symbols — serves as a constant admonition to them to 
speak the truth." 

Tried by this tenet, therefore, and with no need to 
seek for any other objection, the "false frenzies" of 
stage -players (as Bernard styles them) must be abund- 
antly condemned by those claiming fellowship with the 
religious Society of Friends. Indeed, it was very much 
upon this ground that, four and twenty 
centuries ago, Solon denounced the 
actor's profession as " tending, by its 
simulation of false character and by its expression of 
sentiment not genuine or sincere, to corrupt the integrity 
of human dealings." Upon the same principle did Rous- 
seau frankly condemn the stage. " It is," says he, " the 
art of dissimulation ; of assuming a foreign character, and 



Bernard and Rous- 
seau against false 
frenzies. 



Profanity of simula- 
ted prayer. 



THE THEATRE. 39 

of appearing differently from what a man really is ; of 
flying into a passion without a cause, and of saying what 
he does not think as naturally as if he really did ; in a 
word, of forgetting himself, to personate others." 
/S Accompanying this personation is the frequent pro- 
fanity involved, in word and in attitude. A lady gave 
this as the immediate cause impelling 
her to renounce the theatre : " As she 
beheld actors fall upon their knees, and in simulated de- 
votion offer up prayers to Heaven, a revelation of both 
subject and surroundings suddenly flashed upon her." 

It must have been near the time that Clarkson was 
penning his " Portraiture" that Elizabeth Fry (then 
Gurney), going up from Norwich to London, was'afforded 
opportunity by her father to enter upon a previously ar- 
ranged season of gayety in the pleasure-loving city. 
Sprightly and very much admired though she was, she 
had but a short time previously been 
brought to reflect with seriousness upon 
the tendency of her then course of life 
through listening to the preaching of William Savery, 
from Philadelphia. In her journal, which she began 
early to keep, she says at this time (1798) in commenting 
upon a visit to the theatre : 

" I own I enter into the -gay world reluctantly. I do 
not like plays. I think them so artificial that they are to 
me not interesting, and all seem so, so very far from pure 
virtue and nature. There is acting, music, scenery to 
perfection ; but I was glad when it was over." 



Elizabeth Fry re-, 
nounces the thea- 
tre. 



4-0 THE THEATRE. 

Obedient to the heavenly vision, she immediately 
thereafter wholly gave up attending public places of 
amusement, for she afterward averred — " I saw they ten- 
ded to promote evil, led many from the path of rectitude, 
and brought them into much sin." Consider the loss 
not only to " Outcast London " but to the world at large, 
had Elizabeth Fry come to a different decision, and con- 
cluded that the theatre, being intended to " amuse and 
instruct," it was little worth while for her — a mere girl 
of seventeen — to disturb herself over the wretchedness of 
the metropolis or the ills of a world which it must be 
quite out of her power to mend or measurably alleviate. 
How little she knew then that in turning away from the 
theatre she should ever by an act of hers give occasion 
for such a remark as that which was made by a certain 
nobleman, who, seeing how she addressed the women 
felons at Newgate, and how reaching were her pathetic 
words, observed that it was the " deepest tragedy " he 
had ever witnessed. 

Showing a like apprehension of the unsatisfying nature 
of the world's entertainments was the experience of 
Mary Capper, who at the age of twenty-one— being then 
a member of the Established Church of England — came 
to London from her parent's home at Rugeley, Stafford- 
shire. She was on her way to France for the benefit of 
her health. She says (1776) : 

" My brother Jasper called and took us to dine with 
my brother William. After we had coffee we called a 
coach, intending to go and spend the evening with my 



Experience of Mary 
Capper. 



THE THEATRE. 41 

uncle Capper, in Berkeley Square, but an unaccountable 
whim entering the head of my brother William (promp- 
ted, I have no doubt, by his wish to give 
us pleasure), he asked if we should have 
any objection to see the opera to be performed that 
night. I was inclined to refuse, but fancying that my 
friend had a desire to hear [the actress-singer], I accom- 
panied her without reluctance. My disappointment and 
disgust are not to be described ; I had heard much of 
the shining qualities of [the actress], and therefore ex- 
pected something extraordinary ; but of all the figures I 
ever saw she is the most miserable, and her impudence 
is inconceivable In the midst of my chagrin, I could 
not help feeling emotions of pity for the poor, unhappy 
wretch, who, in her serious moments, must call to mind 
a life spent in such a manner ; how melancholy a retro- 
spect! I may truly say, my intended pleasure was turned 
into actual pain. I was very ill afterward." And so 
this dedicated handmaid of the Lord, whose helpful let- 
ters from the quiet rural home of her later life must have 
been blessed to many of those who received them, was 
likewise preserved for a better purpose than that of fol- 
lowing the world's alluring pleasures. 

Very like a companion piece to the foregoing — the 
place being Paris instead of London — was the experience 
in this matter of the late Christine Alsop (then Majolier), 
who, at the age of twenty-two, being on her way from 
the South of France to the home of William Allen, in 
England, stopped for a brief rest in Paris. She was ac- 



Experience of 
Christine Majolier. 



42 THE THEATRE. 

companied by a brother. Having gone to the same hotel 
as the one selected by two of their traveling companions 
in the diligence, they accepted the invitation of these 
acquaintances (Christine reluctantly) to go with them to 
the Theatre Frangais. Observing the dissipated looks of 
those around her, she felt a sort of horror at being in 
such a place, and thus instructively remarks : 

" I durst not ask to go out, but I was very unhappy. 
I felt ashamed that any one should see my Friend's bon- 
net, so I took it off and put it under the seat. The 
dresses, both of the men and women, were such as I was 
ashamed to see. Then followed one of 
the worst of the representations. I shut 
my eyes and dared not look, and at my solicitation our 
friends left the place. I have never forgotton the cir- 
cumstance or my impressions at that time ; and I have 
often felt glad that the scene was of such a description, 
because my judgment was then quite settled ; and though 
some who are in the practice of attending such places 
have often tried to persuade me to go, telling me that my 
judgment was formed on the worst example possible, I 
have never felt at liberty to do so, persuaded as I am 
that if those who do attend these places are not shocked, 
it is because they have been led to it by degrees, and 
that if a woman's modesty can be tlms blunted, the influ- 
ence must be unfavorable on her mind." 

To which I would add the remark that when any, 
in going to a place of entertainment, find themselves 
tempted to cast aside the plain or simple attire which 



Attending the opera 
gives countenance 
to the ballet. 



THE THEATRE 43 

they may have customarily worn, let them consider how 
they are therein departing from the truth and treading 
upon ground whereon they feel that Christ cannot 
bear them company. 

The writer may be allowed briefly to add, with respect 
to his own experience (being previous to his uniting in 
membership with a religious society), that his great fond- 
ness for music drew him into attendance at the opera, 
which he held to be less objectionable than the theatre. 
Nevertheless, being one evening on his way to an enter- 
tainment of this kind, and but a few steps from his home 
in the city, he was met in the way by 
the merciful Spirit of Christ, who gave 
him to see that by attendance at such a 
place — though accounted the first of its class — he was 
countenancing performances concerning which he would 
have no peace were his own brother or sister, or other 
loved relative or friend, among the singers and actors ; 
that it was not a resort where humble, godly people were 
likely to be found, and therefore could not be a safe re- 
sort for him ; that the habit was an expensive one, as well 
as wasteful of time, and that it was one which was grow- 
ing upon him. Immediately turning about, so effectually 
was he convinced, that (he can gratefully say) he never 
again attended the opera, or even had a desire to do so. 

It will not be out of place to say here, respecting the 
plea of many " church-going " people whose musical 
tastes lead them to attend the opera, yet who would not 
be seen at a theatre, that the ballet is an invariable, or 



Woman's appear- 
ance on the stage 
did not reform it. 



44 THE THEATRE. 

almost invariable, accompaniment of the rendition of 
opera. In giving assent, therefore, to an unseemly 
public display so morally damaging to the performers 
as is the ballet, they must, if they have given the matter 
any serious thought at all, be doing despite to the spirit 
of grace in their hearts, unless, indeed, that God-given 
monitor and preserver from the world's evils has already 
ceased to be tender. 

Woman's appearance upon the stage, it will be freely 
admitted, did not reform it. Among the ancient Greeks 
the actors were invariably males — women being excluded 
from witnessing comedies, though ad- 
mitted to tragedies. Women were, and. 
I believe still are, prohibited as actors upon the Chinese 
stage ; while in Europe they did not so appear until the 
seventeenth century — first, in France, and, a little later, 
in England, in the reign of Charles the Second. Of old, 
the dance of the daughter of Herodias compassed the 
death of the prophet who proclaimed the coming of the 
Son of God : in this generation, none may number the 
slain of the ballet and of woman's other immodest and 
degrading appearances in the public play-house. Viewing 
the signal dishonor thus done the sex, it would seem as 
though there might in this connection, and in con- 
nection with the demoralizing literature of the day, be a 
field for dedicated labor by woman in woman's behalf, 
which has hitherto been not much occupied. 

While it is, I know, the boast of those who move in 
fashionable life that they are well-versed in fiction, and 



The pious Nonna no 
theatre-goer. 



THE THEATRE. 45 

that they would hold themselves quite disgraced could 
they not say they had seen the chief plays and heard all 
the noted singers in opera, yet a better 
record for any Christian will it be if it 
can be said of such a one what was said of the pious 
Nonna by her son, the celebrated Gregory Nazianzen, 
who, enumerating her virtues, began with this, — " That 
she never visited the theatre." 

Leaving individual experiences, let us next consider 
the character of some of the temptations through which 
th& young are led to attend the theatre, as well as some 
of the results following therefrom. To quote again from 
the tract, "Can I Attend the Theatre?": "The present 
director of the city prison in Paris says : ' If a new play 
of a vicious character has been put on the boards, I very 
soon find it out by the number of young fellows who 
come into my custody.' * * ' Oh, that theatre /' said the 
agonized mother of a felon son ; ' he was a virtuous, 
kind youth till that theatre proved his ruin.' The in- 
evitable effect of the play-house is the corruption of 
youth. Prof. Knowles states that at a juvenile prison it 
was ascertained that a large proportion of the boys began 
their Career in vice by stealing money to 
buy theatre tickets ; and a keeper of a 
juvenile prison in Boston gave testimony that 'of twenty 
young men confined for crime, seventeen confessed that 
they were first tempted to steal by a desire to purchase 
tickets to visit the theatre.' Who has not seen famished- 
looking boys scanning with keen interest the glaring bills 



The theatre an in- 
citer to crime. 



46 THE THEATRE. 

that disfigure our streets, and apparently resolving, by 
fair means or foul, to gain admittance to the play ! Of 
fifteen young men from the country, employed in a pub- 
lishing house in New York, thirteen, within a few years, 
were led to destruction by the play-house." 

But what led these boys to desire to attend the play ? 
In very many cases they were doubtless brought to it by 
the morally-destructive reading matter which they hab- 
itually handled; for true it is that there are thousands of 
our youth whose literature is limited to the recitals of 
crime. Says a writer in a Methodist weekly of recent 
date : " While visiting the State Prison in Indiana, a 
short time ago, the chaplain of the institution told me 
that out of one hundred and twenty-one prisoners who 
were then confined in the prison inclosure, and who were 
convicted before they became of age, 
ninety-two attributed their crimes and con- 
sequent convictions to the fact of their minds having 
been corrupted and poisoned by reading the vile and false 
papers and books that are to be everywhere found 
throughout this land to-day." 

The process of making bad boys with rapidity is 
graphically told as follows by a local paper in comment- 
ing upon late disorderly occurrences by lads of Milwau- 
kee — not acted upon " the boards," but in real life. I 
presume no excuse need be offered for its insertion, 
as the item brings us nearer to the causes which im- 
pel to theatre-going. The excerpt is but one of scores 
giving information of a similar tenor which might be 



The agency of per- 
nicious literature. 



THE THEATRE. 47 

culled in a short time from the columns of the daily 
press. 

"The small boys in Milwaukee have risen in their 
cunning and in their might and carried consternation to 
the heart of every householder. Within the past month 
there have been nine incendiary fires within a single 
ward of that city, where the small boys have a Buffalo 
Bill organization. According to the despatches, the city- 
is virtually in a state of siege. The police force has been 
doubled, a tower watch has been erected by the direction 
of the Fire Chief, the Chief of Police is in receipt of 
letters threatening him with assassination, the local un- 
derwriters are holding daily meetings, and they and 
Mayor Stowell are offering special rewards for the 
detection of the incendiaries. All this in the great 
German town, that has heretofore boasted of being the 
most beer-drinking and the most orderly community of 
its size on the continent ! This state of things is a sad 
commentary upon the sort of literature on which Mil- 
waukee's humorist has been bringing up the boys of the 
vicinage. He has sown the wind and now he is reaping 
the whirlwind of bad boys. His seemingly harmless 
pleasantries, in which the pranks of precocious mischief 
are made the source of indulgent laughter, seem to be 
having an unexpected result. George W. Peck, who, we 
believe, before he became a professional humorist, was 
himself the Chief of Police in a Western city, ought to be 
put under bonds not to write any more books or stories 
about bad boys." 



Connection between 
juvenile pranks and 
overt crime. 



48 THE THEATRE. 

The process of educating the youthful mind to a liking 
for the pantomine, comedy, and other theatricals by feed- 
ing it upon such pabulum as comic papers, silly and 
grotesquely illustrated magazine articles, 
and the like, is not difficult to perceive. 
A judicious parent, if he deems it worth while to advert to 
the odd or simply ludicrous pranks of his little ones, will 
generally take occasion to speak of these droll perform- 
ances when the subjects of them are not present. When 
we get beyond what is only humorous, and take up with 
silly exaggerations and distortions of the truth, we offend 
against the Scripture injunction as to our yea and nay, 
and are welcoming that which " cometh of evil." So, when 
a fondness for mimicry and playing practical jokes has 
been developed in their boys, the parents of these may 
be sure that the safety-line has been passed, and that 
prayerful solicitude and active counteracting efforts are 
more in place than is " indulgent laughter." 

The connection which I am endeavoring to show is 
apparent in such items of daily intelligence as this : Six 
child burglars, nine to twelve years of age, were arrested 
in Paterson, New Jersey. They constituted a regularly 
organized band, and when arrested were on their way 
from a cheap theatre. 

What will they have probably seen at the cheap theatre? 
This flashy advertising sheet (which claims a circulation 
of five hundred thousand), profusely illustrated with pic- 
tures of brigand-looking heroes and Indians dashing 
headlong over the plains, will tell us. It is an invitation 



THE THEATRE. 49 

to the play of " Buffalo Bill's Wild West — America's 
National Entertainment," giving details of " the startling 
and soul-stirring attack on the Deadwood mail-coach by 
Indians," and a promise of marvelous representations of 
free life on the frontier, well calculated to turn the heads 
of errant boys and set them upon lives of adventure and 
crime. That this story and play have had precisely this 
effect, the late abundant police captures of lads going 
West with stolen money in their pockets, pistols and 
knives in their belts, and dime novels and pictures of 
actors as part of their limited baggage, sufficiently attest. 
This " City of Brotherly Love " was, last New Year's 
Day (1884), the field of such a display of masqueraders, 
mostly boys, as would seem to indicate how general 
must have been their acquaintance with stage representa- 
tions. Before noon of the previous day two hundred and 
four permits to parade had been issued by the Mayor to 
as many clubs and social organizations, who, accordingly, 
in their fantastic attire, representative of clowns, harle- 
quins, mimics, etc., paraded and capered around in a 
manner which should have called for the shedding of 
tears by the beholders rather than for 
that indulgence in merriment or other 
exhibition of approval which was too generally evoked. 
One of these hilarious, reckless crews I met — lads of 
perhaps eight to eighteen years of age, and about twenty 
in number. They had halted at the side door of a 
liquor-saloon, and noisily accepting the invitation of the 
laughing proprietor to step within, sat down to the long 



Juvenile masquera- 
ders. 



50 THE THEATRE. 

lunch table, while the chuckling rum-dealer — his arms 
a-kimbo as he smiled upon the young recruits whom 
he had gathered into his den — only leered a response to 
the warning not to deal them out any beer or other in- 
toxicating drink. Asking myself how the fathers and 
mothers of at least some of those boys would have felt 
had they seen this saddening sight, I could only turn 
away with the scarcely suppressed ejaculation, " How 
long, O Lord! must such things be?" 

A few weeks later there appeared in one of our dailies 
a communication from a mother, signing herself " Anx- 
ious Heart," in which counsel was craved on account of her 
wayward son, a lad of fifteen, who persisted in running 
the streets with bad boys and in spending his wages at 
places of amusement. Here we behold the other side of 
the merry-andrew's picture, which the amused public 
cares not at all to see. 

I would plead here with those parents, who, with true 
love for their offspring, desire them to escape the hurtful 
publications, theatre-going, and other contaminations of a 
" world lying in wickedness," to see to it that they them- 
selves set a good example in testifying (among other 
things) against the purveyors of pernicious literature. 
The proprietor of a news-stand near a much-frequented 
railroad depot, upon being mildly expostulated with by 
the writer for offering low papers like the Police Gazette 
for sale, defiantly responded that he would sell anything 
the law allowed him to. Not patronizing the owners of 
stands where such debasing publications are kept may 



Faithful testifying 
against pernicious 
literature needed. 



THE THEATRE. 5 1 

at times cause one to go out of his way for his custom- 
ary paper, or even to miss getting it altogether ; yet I 
cannot doubt but that a Christian, jealous 
of the honor of his Master, is as much 
called to submit to so trifling a sacrifice, 
as he is to keep away from saloons where vile liquors are 
handed over the counter. And if it be said that this is 
too slight a matter to make an issue about — that there is 
here very little of letting one's " light shine " — I reply that 
there is, nevertheless, a reward promised by the Highest 
for the least act of dedication done (not as of works, but 
of grace) unto Him in secret. It was said by Fenelon : 
" He who learns, by Divine assistance, to make a right 
application in small matters of a spiritual nature will 
not fail to accumulate much treasure, as well as will he 
who is attentive in temporal concerns." 

Likewise should the parent exercise the same discrim- 
ination as to the character of the daily paper which he 
brings to or has served at his home. There are few 
editors or publishers of such papers who keep posted in 
their offices (and who, upon penalty of dismissal, insist 
upon its observance) a notice like this, which is to be 
found in the office of a daily in one of our large cities ; 
''Nothing shall appear in the columns of the Daily News 
which a young lady may not with propriety read aloud 
before a mixed company." According to the Christian 
Weekly : " An examination recently made showed that 
in the five leading New York morning papers, excluding 
the market reports and shipping news, an average of 



52 THE THEATRE. 

thirty per cent, of the space given to reading-matter was 
devoted to accounts of murders, suicides, and crimes of 
every grade, dressed up in all the circumstantial details 
possible to be obtained." Knowing, therefore, what 
must be the result upon the impressible minds of 
the young of the regular reading of a mass of such 
details, the parent who has a concern for the moral 
training of his children will be always anxious when 
he sees them with a newspaper (unselected by himself) 
in hand. 

We therefore reach the point that back of the bad 
reading which stimulates to theatre-going and overt 
crime, there is an absence of that parental restraint and 
tender concern which ought to prevail, so that it is in a 
great measure owing to this lack of care 
that these hurtful habits are permitted 
to be formed and to get the mastery. Nevertheless, 
when the attempt is made to discover all the causes of 
crime commission, especially in a great city, we need to 
consider the temptations of the drinking-saloon ; the 
pool, billiard, and gambling rooms ; the working in fac- 
tories, with (in very many cases) the demoralizing asso- 
ciations connected therewith; the contaminating influ- 
ences of close crowding in tenement-houses, — all of these, 
and others unnamed, in connection with the pernicious 
reading and the low theatres and music-halls already 
remarked upon. When we weigh all these influences 
thus working toward the reinforcement of the kingdom 
of Satan, we are prepared to admit that a great deal of 



Absence of paren 
tal restraint. 



THE THEATRE. 53 

effort may be expended, only to be largely counteracted 
by the overpowering evil. 

Thus, Judge Bulstrode, of Middlesex County, England 
(in which county is the city of London), expressed the 
opinion in a jury charge that one play-house ruins more 
souls in a single year than fifty churches save. In the 
report of the Howard Association, of London, for the 
year 1 880, it was stated on the authority of the chaplain 
of Clerkenwell Prison, that " out of fifty boys sent to the 
prison from the ages of 9^ to 16 years, forty-eight had 
been Sunday-school scholars; that forty -two of these 
had attended regularly, and twenty-nine had received 
prizes. Now, either the instruction had been very defec- 
tive, or it must have been nullified by evil influences." 

Further, the methods of attempted cure may be very 
unwisely and mischievously employed. For example, 
a wealthy tobacco manufacturer in one of our cities has 
recently established a large free library and reading- 
room for his employes, with the object, as stated, of fur- 
nishing them " a place where they can pleasantly and 
profitably spend their Sundays and evenings without 
cost." In so far as the undertaking is indicative of a 
feeling of real and generous sympathy on the part of the 
employer for his work-people, it is to be altogether com- 
mended; but as we learn that "in addition, there are 
playing-cards, chess, dominoes, and other games," the 
good resultant from the enterprise will be likely 
to be counterbalanced by that which does not tend 
to profit. A late writer in a London magazine, discours- 



54 



THE THEATRE. 



Wise and unwise 
correctives. 



ing upon the prolific theme of the poor of the world's 
metropolis, recommends that the factory girls, etc., be 
afforded opportunities for indulging in 
dancing, gratuitous music being likewise 
furnished. The well-to-do, argues this reasoner, have 
their high-priced theatres and fancy balls ; the poor 
should not be deprived of their free music and 
dancing. Such alleviations may suit those, whether the 
rich or the poverty-stricken, whose ken does not consider 
the never-ending life beyond the grave for which present 
preparation needs to be made; yet the one message of 
George Fox, John Wesley, and Rowland Hill, to all 
alike, in London or otherwheres, was that the Gospel was 
commanded to be preached, and that, accepting its free 
proffers of forgiveness and mercy, all might know " the 
unsearchable riches of Christ" and be partakers of the 
"joy that is past finding out." With the love of God in the 
heart, and a tempered and purified purpose, content to 
do the Master's bidding within the narrow way, the sad 
problem of city life among the lowly might be solved, 
and the promise of Scripture be fulfilled, that " one [shall] 
chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight." 

In an article upon " Centres of Spiritual Activity," 
published the past winter by the Pall Mall Gazette, there 
occurs an interesting account of carefully-planned work 
which is carried on (by the Friends) in connection with 
the Bedford Institute, London. The following extract 
may throw some light upon the problem how best to 
combat the attractions of the play-house : 



THE THEATRE. 55 

" For wet weather and winter months, the libraries, 
lectures, discussion classes, and similar occupations are 
rendered available. Occasionally, industrial exhibi- 
tions are held; and these are found to be among the 
very best means of promoting recreation and amusement 
in connection with home and family life. The Friends 
do not encourage theatres or dancing parties, as tending 
in their view rather to foster pleasure-loving habits un- 
favorable to domestic comfort and contentment ; but by 
offering prizes to be competed for by men and women, 
children and adults, and including a large variety of 
handicraft work, as carpentry, cabinet work, metallurgy, 
carving, drawing, sewing, tailoring, cooking, collections 
of natural history objects, etc., there is secured for 
months before the exhibitions a widely diffused and 
deeply interested activity in many a home, which 
not only keeps the workers out of mischief, but draws 
forth their skill and ability, affords them a prolonged 
pleasure in the midst of their families, and ultimately 
meets with the sympathizing appreciation of many of 
their friends and neighbors." 

I believe that all the Churches commonly called evan- 
gelical have declared their opposition to or have cautioned 
against attendance at the theatre ; but it is lamentable to 
know that in many instances the proceeds of theatrical 
entertainments have not been refused by 
the religious bodies to whom they have 
been tendered. Here is another serious stumbling-block. 
It was Chrysostom who said, "The Church receives no 



Receiving the pro- 
ceeds of theatrical 
entertainments. 



56 THE THEATRE. 

offerings from the injurious." In our own day there 
ought be no exception to the rule of refusal such as was 
held by George Muller, founder of the British orphan- 
houses, who, being proffered the proceeds of a theatre 
benefit, promptly returned the same as unlawful to be 
used in a religious cause, though he was at the time in 
great straits for money. The " Sunday Breakfast Asso- 
ciation " of this city has more than once been tendered a 
theatrical entertainment for its benefit, but its president 
has said that he will in the future, as in the past, steadily 
refuse to be helped by any such methods. 

Respecting legislation by the States or General Gov- 
ernment upon this matter, the United States Congress, 
in 1778, adopted a resolution that stringent measures be 
taken to suppress theatrical entertainments, horse-racing, 
and gaming as being productive of idle- 
ness, dissipation, and general depravity 
of morals. It is not probable that any such resolution 
would be favorably reported now. Interesting in this 
connection is the following from the diary of Mary Cap- 
per, when in attendance at the Yearly Meeting, London, 
in 1794: "The men's meeting sent us for perusal a very 
interesting communication from Friends in America; 
some of whom, in considering the late awful visitation 
of some parts of that continent, were so deeply concerned 
for the general good that they had believed it required 
From them to represent to the rulers and persons in 
power the necessity for their exerting their authority to en- 
deavor to suppress all public amusements, gaming, stage 



U. S. Congress of 
1778 against the the- 
atre. 



Suppression of the 
theatre in England. 



THE THEATRE. 57 

entertainments, and dram-shops, as being sources of 
much immorality and profaneness, widely estranging the 
mind from God and godliness." 

As bearing on the pnase of the subject just touched 
upon, it may be well to refer here to some matters rela- 
tive to the drama in Great Britian in the time of Eliza- 
beth and in the century succeeding. During Elizabeth's 
reign, in 1580, there was a partial suppression of the 
theatres. It is related that certain " godly citizens 
and well-disposed gentlemen, of London " brought 
such a pressure to bear\ upon the city magistrates 
that the latter petitioned the Queen to expel all 
players from London, and permit them 
to destroy every theatre within their jur- 
isdiction. Their prayer was granted, so far as the sev- 
eral play-houses within the boundaries of the city proper 
were concerned, they being " quite put down and sup- 
pressed by these religious senators." 

Again, at the time of the Civil War in England, the 
drama had a hard struggle for existence. An act of Par- 
liament (1642), in view of the disturbances in both Eng- 
land and Ireland, provided, among other things, as a 
" possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God 
appearing in these judgments," that "whereas public 
sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor pub- 
lic stage-plays with the season of humilation, this being 
an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other 
being spectacles of pleasure too commonly expressing 
lascivious mirth and levity ; it is therefore thought fit 



58 THE THEATRE. 

and ordered by the Lords and Commons in this Parlia- 
ment assembled, that while these sad causes and set 
times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays cease 
and be forborne." 

This suppressive law not sufficing, in 1647 a m ore 
stringent act was passed, by which it was enacted that 
" all stage-players, and players of interludes and common 
plays are and shall be taken for rogues, whether they 
be wanderers or not, and notwithstanding any license 
whatsoever from the King or any other person or persons 
to that purpose." This protective measure seemed to 
operate with fair success for awhile, but, when Charles 
the Second came in a few years later, the drama was fully 
restored and legalized. 

It is to be remarked that, whenever the plague made 
its appearance in London, the drama was under a cloud ; 
upon the decrease of the pestilence, it reappeared. In 
Sir Henry Herbert's Office-book occurs the following 
memorandum : "On Thursday morning, the 23d of Febru- 
ary, the bill of the plague made the number of forty-four, 
upon which decrease the King gave the players their lib- 
erty, and they began the 24th of Febru- 
ary, 1636. The plague increasing, the 
players lay still until the 2d of October, 
when they had leave to play." 

Although the closing of the theatres was rigidly en- 
joined during the Great Plague (1666), those resorts were 
re-opened with alacrity as soon as it appeared that the 
immediate manifestation of the Divine judgment was 



Stage-playing for- 
bidden during the 
plague. 



THE THEATRE. 59 

passing away. Thus Pepys says in his diary under date 
Eleventh month 20th : " To church, it being Thanksgiv- 
ing-day for the cessation of the plague ; but the town do 
say, that it [the day] is hastened before the plague is 
quite over, there being some people still ill of it, but only 
to get ground of plays to be publicly acted, which the 
bishops would not suffer till the plague was over."* As 
did Israel, so did they : " In the time of their trouble, 
when they cried unto Thee, Thou heardest them from 
Heaven, * * but after they had rest, they did evil 
again before Thee." (Neh. ix, 27, 28.) 

Regarding Colonial and State action, it may serve the 
purpose of showing the laxity now prevailing with re- 
spect to the theatre, if the legal measures early taken 
against it in Pennsylvania only be cited. By the Great 
Law, as it was called, passed the year that Penn first 
came to his Province (1682), it. was provided that " who- 
soever shall introduce into the Province 
or frequent such rude and riotous sports 
as Prizes, Stage-plays, Masques, Revels, 
Bull-Baiting, Cock-fightings, with such like, being con- 
victed thereof, shall be reported and fined as breakers 
of the peace, and suffer at least ten days' imprison- 
ment at hard labor in the House of Correction, or for- 
feit twenty shillings." 

This act was probably repealed by the Queen in 
Council prior to 1700, for in that year the colonists re- 
enacted it. It was, notwithstanding, annulled by the 

* Chambers' Book of Days, vol. 2, page 720. 



The theatre not 
wanted in early Penn- 
sylvania. 



60 THE THEATRE. 

royal Council, but re-enacted with righteous pertinacity 
by the Quaker Assembly the same year. In 1709 the 
Queen's Council again repealed it; the Assembly, un- 
daunted, again enacted it the following year, only to be 
met by a further repeal three years later. Nevertheless, 
the moral sentiment of the Philadelphia community was 
so strongly opposed to theatres that it was not until 
1749 that the first theatrical performances were given, 
and those were by an English company. Their unlawful 
procedure coming to the knowledge of the city authori- 
ties, the company was soon frightened off, and went to 
New York. In 1759 a permanent theatre was built,* to 
the great scandal of various congregations, who forth- 
with petitioned the Assembly, and in the same year 
(" where there's a will, there's a way ") an act was passed 
which made it an indictable offense, punishable by a fine 
of five hundred pounds, to erect any play-house, theatre, 
stage, or scaffold for " acting or exhibiting any tragedy, 
comedy, or tragic-comedy, farce, interlude, or other 
play," or to be concerned in acting or exhibiting any 
such tragedy, etc. This act was likewise repealed by 
the King in council the next year, only to be re-enacted 
in the act of 1779, " for the suppression of vice and im- 
morality." It is evident that the just sentiment of the 
community at large (and not that of the Friends only) 
was opposed to the play-house, as being a prime pro- 
moter of social debasement, for the Friends of the period 

* The first regular play-house in the Colonies appears to have been set up at Williams- 
burg, in Virginia, only seven years before (1752). 



THE THEATRE. 6 1 

of the Revolution were unrepresented in the Assembly 
by which this prohibitory law was enacted.* 

In view of the fact that play-houses, even those of the 
vilest description, are everywhere allowed and licensed 
in our towns and cities, and that it would be in vain to 
look now for any municipal or State action, such as 
above detailed, there is something pathetic in the per- 
tinacity with which this community strove again and 
again to turn aside — to keep away — that leprous invader, 
which the mother country, like an unnatural parent, en- 
deavored with an unrelenting persistency to fasten upon 
it. What were the stamp act and the tax upon tea, as 
absolute grievances, to this ? The tax might be lowered, 
or, by continuous, emphatic, and dignified protest, be 
eventually done away with ; but, as for this canker of the 
play-house, assured were those old-time people that, did 
it once find legalized place, the leaven of its sorcery 
would so work in the community, that first a tolerating, 
then an altogether favoring, public opinion would be 
created, so that its ultimate dislodgment 
would be exceedingly improbable. Yes, 
it is here now, apparently more strongly entrenched, 
growing year by year more corrupt and vile, while the 
measure of the woe that it brings, who can fathom ? 

••■ The Friends, in a corporate capacity, having several times unavailingly appealed to 
John Penn, the Lieutenant-Governor, finally (1770) forwarded an earnest address to 
Thomas and Richard Penn, the Proprietors. In it there occurs this reference confirma- 
tory of the above statement: " The pious and most considerate of other religious denom- 
inations have, at times, for some years past, been repeatedly concerned to address the 
Governors you have placed here against the strolling-players who have come to this 
city." 



The theatre curse 
in Philadelphia. 



The theatre's at- 
traction in Berlin. 



62 THE THEATRE. 

Such large and continuous accessions to our popula- 
tion come to us from Europe — where (except in Great 
Britain) the theatres in the cities are far more thronged 
than are the church-edifices on the first day of the week 
— that, one after another, our American municipalities 
•are succumbing to this ensnaring custom which obtains 
abroad. There may be instruction for us in taking a 
look at the custom as prevalent on the Continent of Europe, 
but I will instance only the city of Berlin, giving the 
concurrent testimony of two witnesses which happens to 
be at hand. One of these, an observant American resi- 
dent, writes thus to Friends' Review* 
Having shown how lightly esteemed is a 
day of rest and religious observance on the part of the 
people generally — for he estimates that only about 
twenty-five thousand in a population of a million frequent 
the places of worship — he proceeds : 

" The principal streets and parks swarm with human 
life. Picnic wagons, carriages, cabs, omnibuses, and horse- 
cars are called into utmost use, especially in the after- 
noon. Restaurants and beer gardens do their hand- 
somest business. Puppet shows, comic plays, foolish 
songs, and horse races satisfy—how easily and miserably 
satisfied ! — the uncultured irreligious during the afternoon 
upon the commons and sandy fields about the suburbs of 
the imperial capital, while brilliantly lighted music con- 
certs, balls, theatres, and operas invite the cultured irre- 
ligious from the entertainment of friends with dinners 

* No. 18, current volume. 



THE THEATRE. 63 

and wines to closing pleasures of the great holiday — 
which day the comparatively few in this great [so-called] 
Christian land feel themselves called of God to keep as a 
holy day. The receptions of foreign ministers, diploma- 
tists, and eminent personages at the Royal Court are the 
commonest occurrences of [First-day] afternoons, and 
State dinners and Ministerial consultations are by no 
means infrequent. The Imperial capital is referred to, 
but not exclusively ; for other cities and towns imitate 
Berlin so far as they can in this respect. 

" People who attend upon worship — I know such well- 
intended Christians — think it perfectly consistent to spend 
the evening at the opera or theatre. They have grown 
up with the -habit and desire of theatre-going, and many 
of them have no scruple about practicing it on Sun- 
day evening, and thus clearing their minds of any serious 
impressions they may have gathered from the morning 
worship. And unfortunately they can readily appeal for 
defense to the example of ' our good Emperor.' The 
Emperor is a pious man, no doubt; most people think so. 
He and his family usually set the good example of at- 
tendance on worship at the Royal Cathedral, and he is 
doubtless a devout worshiper of God.* But while he is at the 

* Without desiring to unnecessarily except to the above writer's charitable opinion 
of the Emperor's piety — and I know it is the one commonly entertained— I would yet 
interpose here the plea of Isaiah, when hecried (iii, 12): " O my people! they which lead 
thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths." Reiterating the charge, he 
says again (ix, 16 : "For the leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that 
are led of them are destroyed." The foremost political representative of Protestantism 
in Germany, in thus habitually frequenting the play-house on that day of the week com- 
monly set apart for rest and religious observance, contemns before all the people that 



64 THE THEATRE. 

Royal Theatre or Royal Opera on Sunday evening, it 
may be witnessing the best and purest play, or opera — 
which is, for any day, not exactly commendable — would 
that he could only remember that thousands of his subjects, 
less informed, less cultured and even-tempered, less pious, 
are attending the most disreputable theatres and circuses. 
A great many of this poorer, illiterate class satisfy their 
appetites and baser desires at beer and dancing halls on 
this evening of the week, to the discomfort and grief of 
better thinking, religious people." 

The testimony of the other witness, an editor of the 
Christian Index, accords with the foregoing, showing us 
the undesirable goal to which our American cities are 
tending — to which, indeed, some of them seem to have 
already attained. 

" While Sunday," says the narrator in giving his own 
experience, " is partially observed until one o'clock, after 
that the day is given up to business and every form of 
worldly amusements and enjoyments. The stores are 
thrown open, men go into the field to rake their hay, 
visits are made and exchanged, beer saloons are crowded 
with both sexes, who sit for hours sipping their favorite 
beverage, while regaled with delightful music or amused 
with comic plays or gymnastic performances by traveling 
actors. Having surfeited themselves with eating and 
drinking, the younger part of the assembly repair to the 

unassailable rule for the guidance of Christians of whatever degree — that they " live 
soberly, righteously, and godly." Court-preacher Stocker is, himself, authority for the 
statement that some parishes of one hundred and twenty thousand souls in the great 
German capital have but five pastors, and one of eighty thousand has only two. 



THE THEATRE. 65 

ball-room and dance until the ' wee small hours ' of 
Monday morn, then to a little repose before beginning the 
labors of another day. So with some. Others attend 
the theatre or opera, whose best pieces and best actors 
are reserved for and presented on Sunday. And these 
are attended by all classes and conditions of society, from 
the highest to the lowest, prices being arranged to suit 
each class and pocket. Here are found those who were 
at church in the morning, even the preacher often in- 
cluded. If a performance of unusual excellence is to 
take place in an adjoining town or city, special trains are 
run and crowds go to Meiningen, for example, where the 
theatre is most celebrated. * * * * 

" The Germans are a fun-loving people, and have 
numerous ' fests ' or festivals, lasting usually three or 
four days, sometimes two or three weeks, always includ- 
ing a Sunday, which is set apart as a ( big day.' This is 
particularly true of the ' Schuetzen Fest ' (shooting feast). 
A large plat of ground is owned or leased by the society 
and rented out to be used for shops, beer saloons, circuses, 
menageries, Punch and Judy exhibitions, merry-go- 
rounds, and all kinds of shows. While these places are well 
attended through the week, Sunday is the great day, 
when visitors come from many miles around, and the 
time is spent in indescribable hilarity and excitement. I 
remember that the authorities at our Philadelphia Expo- 
sition would not permit the doors to be opened on Sun- 
day. At the great exposition at Nuremberg, lasting 
several months, and the largest ever held in Germany, 



66 THE THEATRE. 

Sunday was always the greatest day of all, when ' the 
world, the flesh, and the devil, all seemed in league to 
produce an effect which would far eclipse the gorgeous 
trappery of Bunyan's ' Vanity Fair.' " 

Respecting our American cities, we at the East are, 
in the main, happily exempt from this wholesale misuse 
of the day of rest, so far as the opening of the theatres is 
concerned. In the West, however, where the infusion 
of the German nationality is large, there appears to be a 
rapid approach to (with too frequently an arrival at) the 
undesirable European model. It is within the memory of 
the writer that the city of New Orleans was spoken of as 
possessing a bad pre-eminence in that it was the only 
one in the Union where performances at the theatres on 
the first day of the week were openly tolerated. A re- 
cent writer in the New York Independent, who was a 
resident in the former city for some years previous to 
the breaking out of the late Civil War, testifies to the 
same fact. 

If one will merely glance at the " Amusements " por- 
tion of a Western paper, such as that of the Chicago 
Tribune (published every day of the week), he will find 
whole columns filled with " Special Sunday advertise- 
ments " similar to the following : One 
theatre announces " The Lights of Lon- 
don," another promises "A Spectacular Melodrama," at 
the Grand Opera House will be given an entertainment 
by an " Opera Comique Company," at another place 
an " orchestra of forty performers " may be heard, at 



ay" . 
going in Chicago, 



THE THEATRE. 67 

still another the Great Chicago Museum and Theatre 
offers its varied attractions — and so on. Then there are 
the scores of still lower music halls and play-houses, 
whether advertised or not, which will be found in full 
blast. Hence, we need not seek to probe the repulsive 
depths of wickedness which these together present, to be 
assured that a city, so unmindful of the lesson of the 
awful fire-scourge which desolated it but a few years ago, is 
but heaping together an accumulation of iniquities which 
invite a sorrowful requital in the day of the Lord's visita- 
tion, when He shall make inquiry for the souls of those 
whom the abominations of Baal shall have overcome. 

If we turn next to the " Queen City of the West," we 
observe the like manifestation of a spirit of religious in- 
difference and of pleasure-seeking in the midst of trouble, 
exemplified during the calamitous period of the floods of 
this and of the preceding year. In vain do we look for 
that general bewailment and humbling of self which pros- 
trated Nineveh of old at the preaching of Jonah and caused 
it to turn, for the time at least, repentant to the Lord. One 
of Cincinnati's papers, the Western Christian Advocate, writ- 
ing last year soon after the occurrence of the destructive 
flood of that season, said — with respect 
to the dramatic and musical dissipation 
of its people — that " during the last few 
months there has been an extravagant, almost an insane, 
expenditure for the gratification of this predilection. * * 
But while all this is going on, there are hundreds of 
families in this city who have been in a sad state of pov- 



Cincinnati and the 
lesson of its calami- 
ties. 



68 THE THEATRE. 

erty ever since the flood, and for whom it has been 
extremely difficult to obtain proper food and clothing 
and shelter. * * The Children's Home, that not 
many years ago was the pet of the churches of the 
city, has been lately somehow made the beneficiary of 
a theatrical entertainment. * * The fact that now and 
then the proceeds of an operatic or dramatic entertain- 
ment are applied to a benevolent object does not, on the 
whole, make things better. Real benevolence is not in- 
creased ; and the confused notions upon the subject of 
theatre-going which are induced by such gifts are obvi- 
ously harmful to religion." Then, adverting to the 
thousands of flourishing whisky, wine, and beer saloons 
permitted in their midst, the article concludes — " what a 
spectacle all this to angels and men — religion struggling 
to lift up and purify ; worldliness and extravagance 
seeking to consume wealth in selfish pleasures and ex- 
cesses ; drunkenness abounding, and the dregs of hu- 
manity blacker and more abundant." 

Hence, whether one city or all cities, forgetful of God 
and unreached and unrepentant in the midst of His many 
mercies and mercifully directed judgments, be those 
whose awful punishment and irrecoverable fall are held 
up to us as that of the Babylon which John the Apostle 
saw, there is withal sore need to be re-sounded and 
needfully kept in view what was prophetically uttered 
concerning the callous-hearted city, that, because " she 
saith in her heart, ' I sit a queen, and am no widow, and 
shall see no plagues/ therefore shall her plagues come in 



THE THEATRE. 69 

one day, death and mourning and famine ; and she shall 
be utterly burned with fire ; for strong is the Lord God 
who judgeth her. * * And the voice of harpers and 
musicians, and of pipers and trumpeters, shall be heard 
no more at all in thee."* 

Since the above was written, the great riot at Cincin- 
nati, with its accompaniment of killing, maiming, and 
burning, and the attempted release and threatened lynch- 
ing of its "jailful of murderers," has taken place. Hav- 
ing had occasion last autumn to tarry a First-day in that 
city, I could not but notice the large number of open 
shops, and especially the liquor saloons with wide-open 
doors, many of them filled with young men and mere lads. 
Taking into consideration, therefore, the existence of this 
wholesale and unconcealed drinking habit, together with 
the fact that the theatres and music halls of all kinds are 
open every night of the week, while the Bible is banished 
from the public schools, it was obvious to the writer that 
the w orkers of evil were being multiplied there to an ex- 
tremely dangerous extent. In Cleveland, again, the pub- 
lic school buildings are being used as dancing-halls, 
where the pupils may learn the alluring art of dancing, 
in place of the Bible, which has been expelled. 

* The writer is very far from desiring to magnify the seriousness of the situation either 
in the cities named or in any others. Remembering that, in all our commercial centres, 
there are found those, and many of them, who are of " the salt of the earth," he would 
adopt the language of that gentle-hearted spirit who wrote of London in the midst of 
its abounding wickedness : 

" Ten righteous would have saved a city once, 
Hut thou hast manv righteous — well for thee 
That salt preserves thee. " 



7<D THE THEATRE. 

Now, it is recorded as a circumstance indicative of the 
reckless forgetfulness of Heaven which marked the moral 
condition of the French populace at the chaotic period of 
the Reign of Terror, that they proclaimed, among other 
liberties, that of the theatre ; so that there were soon no 
less than five and twenty play-houses open in the city of 
Paris alone, where before there had been but six. It is a 
historical truth that in times of war, when men's passions 
are most stirred, and in the years immediately succeeding 
a war, when the wave of resultant demoralization is at its 
flood, that the play-houses in the cities are to an excep- 
tional extent thronged. 

So I think we may safely deduce from this fact that 
the play-houses are not at those times (or indeed at any 
time) frequented as schools wherein to witness and to be 
improved by the characterization of virtue, and that the 
theatre may not be thence commended as a morally safe 
place of resort for those who make pro- 
fession of the Christian name. But that 
which gives occasion for very serious present reflection 
is, that in this time of profound peace throughout the 
country, and of numberless blessings showered upon us 
from the Almighty's hand, the play-houses should be 
looked upon with far more tolerance than in the period of 
the Puritan Commonwealth or the early American Repub- 
lic, while at the same time they are probably (upon the 
average) as low in character and proportionally as great 
in number as they were in Paris when that city was 
under the sway of the God-denying, blood-seeking, and 
depraved leaders of the French Revolution. 



Seriousness of the 
present situation. 



THE THEATRE. 7 1 

Perhaps there may be no more fitting place than just 
here to refer to that misapplication of the virtue of hospi- 
tality, which under its name and cover permits church- 
professing men to take their guests to the theatre. A 
Buddha- worshiping dignitary from Japan or China comes 
to our shores, and for an evening's entertainment is taken 
to a play, which must give him a very low conception of 
what our Christianity permits. A blanket Indian from 
the plains, whose children are being taught the " better 
religion" at an agency school, or perhaps at Carlisle, is 
marched to a variety theatre, where he is similarly im- 
pressed by our civilization and social corruption. As to 
the display of civic hospitality among our own people, a 
military organization or Masonic lodge visits a distant city, 
and all in a body, as an essential part of the programme 
of good fellowship, are led to witness scenes upon the 
stage which they would be ashamed to introduce to their 
families at home. Is there aught of the grace of hospi- 
tality in thus manifesting the work of the devil ? I 
remember being painfully impressed with this thought 
when, several years ago, a military company of young 
men from a Southern city came on to New York, and 
were taken by their hosts to theatres where notoriously 
immoral plays were enacted. 

I have felt ever since that I would like to appeal to the 
parents, wives, and sisters of those visiting Atlanta young 
men, and perhaps through this medium it may reach them 
even now. And yet while I write sincerity obliges me 
to admit, that there is a large field for the exercise of 



Responsibility of 
the professing 
Church. 



72 THE THEATRE. 

solicitude and fraternal appeal right in my own city ; 
for, in an item of last month which is before me, I read 
how a junior cricket club of Philadelphia — about two 
dozen lads of from ten to eighteen years of age — visited 
a similar junior club of New York; how on the evening 
of the day of arrival they " went to the theatre in a 
body ;" how they played their cricket match the following 
day, and " again visited a metropolitan theatre together." 
I come now to the last (and generally little considered) 
division of my subject, it being of the nature of an in- 
quiry as to how far the professing 
Church may be responsible for the fos- 
tering and present prevalence of the theatre and theatri- 
cal entertainments. 

It appears to have been in the thirteenth century that 
the external part of religious worship was loaded down 
with many additions, intended by their outward splendor 
and magnificence to completely overawe the multitude. 
" Now it was," says a late writer, " that the stage was 
pressed into the service of the Church, and the mys- 
teries and moralities were written and placed therein, 
illustrating by scenic action sacred subjects." These 
miracle plays, mysteries, and interludes were, as has been 
mentioned before, the first theatrical per- 
formances in the Middle Ages, and 
marked the origin of the modern European stage. They 
were usually given in convents, colleges, and church edi- 
fices, or in the halls of the nobility. Of these " mysteries" 
of the Middle Ages, Hannah More remarks: "Events too 



Stage " mysteries 1 
of the Middle Ages. 



THE THEATRE. 73 

solemn for exhibition and too awful for detail were 
brought before the audience with a gravity more offen- 
sive than levity itself." 

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries many 
were the protests against these and other moral abuses 
accompanying the Papal rule, but now again in this nine- 
teenth century of the Christian era, when it would seem as 
though the spiritual ought to keep pace with material 
enlightenment, the professing Church is nevertheless 
making alarming approaches in the direction of ritualism, 
sacerdotalism, and ceremonialism. As Howard Crosby 
with much plainness, yet very truthfully, says : 

"The Church of God is to-day courting the world. 
Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of 
the ungodly. The ball, the theatre, nude and lewd art, 
social luxuries with all their loose moralities, are making 
inroads into the sacred inclosure of the Church, and, as 
a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians are 
making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday 
and church ornamentation. It is the old trick of Satan. 
The Jewish Church struck on that rock ; the Roman 
Church was wrecked on the same, and the Protestant 
Church is fast reaching the like doom." 

Upon this theme of " church ornamentation " that 
gifted writer of religious poetry, the late Frances R. 
Havergal, wrote thoughtfully and discriminatingly, not 
long before her death, in treating of the matter of 
" Christmas Decorations." Her opinion hereupon is 
certainly entitled to serious attention, especially as pro- 



F. R. Havergal on 
church ornamenta- 
tion. 



74 THE THEATRE. 

ceeding from one who, with such a love for harmonic 
measures in language, might have been thought likely 
to look with an indulgent eye upon the grace of floral 
decoration — even in church edifices. With the hope that 
her clear expression upon this subject 
may be heeded in a direction where out- 
ward show, not to say " stage effects," 
have been making rapid strides during recent years, I 
quote the following passage : 

" The experience of every honest conscience shows 
that when we, who naturally love all that is beautiful^ 
enter a church [building] beautifully decorated, the temp- 
tation to wandering eyes and thoughts is just in propor- 
tion to the exquisiteness and elaborateness of the decora- 
tions. We have come to seek Jesus, to find the Shepherd 
1 by the footsteps of the flock ;' we want to commune 
with Him, and we want Him to speak to our hearts ; we 
want to be freshly and specially ' looking unto Jesus' in 
all the meaning of that word, looking away from all else, 
looking unto Him ; and at once our eye is caught by an 
elegant festoon, and a singularly effective twining of a 
pillar or picking out of a moulding, and a novel arrange- 
ment of the panels of the pulpit. It is all lovely, much 
prettier than last year, the general effect is so good, and 
so on. And suddenly we remember what we came for, 
and we make a great effort to turn away our eyes and 
fix them on 'Jesus only;' but somehow the electric 
chain has been severed, the ' other things ' have entered 
in ; and when we again look up, to meet the smile of the 



THE THEATRE. 75 

1 Prince of Peace,' we find there has been ' something be- 
tween,' our eyes have involuntarily turned away from the 
' King in His beauty' to the passing prettiness of garland 
and wreath. What have we not lost?" 

Although the tendency of the times is toward the le- 
gally setting apart as public holidays those days 
which certain religious denominations have habitually 
observed in commemoration of the birth, death, and 
resurrection of the Son of God, yet the result of this au- 
thorization has been (at least in all the cities) to so mark- 
edly crowd the theatres and all pleasure resorts, and so 
to give opportunity for indulgence in riotous conduct and 
licentious revelry, that many have reached the conclusion 
that the enactment of these public holidays was unwise. 
One quotation from a Baptist paper of a 
year or two since will serve for much 
which might be adduced to show that these so-called 
"holy-days " are made the occasions for hilarious ex- 
cesses, which are notably on the increase, and which 
really make them, as estimated by their results, the most 
uuholy of all the days of the year. 

" Our own city [Atlanta] was disgraced in a deplorable 
manner. We hope never to be forced to see the like 
again. Crowds of men and boys, white and black, surged 
through the streets and obstructed the sidewalks, drink- 
ing, swaggering, cursing, and blackguarding each other, 
flourishing pistols, firing them in utter disregard of the 
danger to life and limb, and otherwise indulging in acts 
of depravity and beastliness. One or two persons were 



Holy-days occa- 
sions for excess. 



J 6 THE THEATRE. 

murdered or mortally wounded, desperate rencontres took 
place, many were bruised, and the few arrests that could 
be made under this condition of affairs sufficed to fill the 
police station until cells and corridors could hold no 
more. The pistol, knife, club, and whisky-bottle ap- 
peared to be the controlling factors of our communal 
system. A day theoretically supposed to be devoted to 
the Christian rites of peace and love and good-will, 
and consecrated to the advent on earth of the Son of 
God, the blessed Redeemer of the world, was turned into 
a Saturnalia, made foul with the slime of orgies, and 
blackened with the records of atrocious crimes." 

But, it may be objected, all this iniquity is merely inci- 
dental to those days, and ought not to be charged upon 
the professing Church. Without conceding this, let us 
turn from the gross and forbidding picture, and consider 
whether the mantle of the Christian religion is not thrown 
over practices which, if seemingly more refined than 
those just brought to view, are yet of so insidious a nature 
that their influence is altogether in opposition to true, 
spiritual religion. 

It cannot now be consistently claimed in many quarters 
that the end sought in associating together as religious 
congregations is simply the worship of God and the " com- 
munion of saints." The Church must provide entertain- 
ment as well. Now, from the church 
fair, oyster supper, and strawberry festi- 
val, to amateur operatics and the stage, the step has 
been proven to be not a long one. Thus, the first annual 



Church theatricals. 



THE THEATRE. 77 

report of a church "guild" sets forth "that during- the past 
year six entertainments were given at the club-house, a 
series of tableaux in parish school building, and a theat- 
rical entertainment at the Amateur Drawing Room. These 
entertainments increased the membership of the club and 
will be continued during the present year." 

Again, we find pool and billiard tables, etc., provided 
for clubs of workingmen under the care of churches, and 
series of public games between the clubs announced — 
with theatricals following. At Saratoga, early in the 
year, a fancy dress ball for the benefit of a " Rectory 
Fund " was given, followed by a grand banquet at mid- 
night, and (according to a secular paper) the resuming 
of the dancing thereafter and its continuation until a late 
hour. The Guide to Holiness , upon this matter of " stand- 
ing in the mixture," aptly says : 

" The discovery has been made that the Church, in order 
to hold its young people to its altars, must provide for the 
natural craving for amusement. It used to be held that 
Jesus and His work furnished ample resources to meet 
the loftiest aspirations of a saved soul. * * The holidays 
furnish occasion for the ingenious and progressive sons 
and daughters of Zion to make full proof of their new 
vocation. They are now busy preparing dramas, come- 
dies, farces, suppers, fairs, and entertainments of every 
conceivable sort. They are spending 'their wretched 
strength for naught.' So far from preventing attendance 
upon a full-grown theatre and opera by these efforts, they 
are whetting the appetite of the people therefor. * * It 



78 THE THEATRE. 

is eating out the life of the Church — it is destroying our 
young people, rendering them unfit for all true spiritual 
exercise. Give your money liberally for every laudable 
Church object — but stand aloof, positively, in the holidays 
and evermore, from the unholy festivals." 

Without desiring to unduly pursue this concluding 
portion of my topic, I believe it is nevertheless of the 
first importance that it be clearly shown wherein the pro- 
fessing Church, in this matter, obstructs and stumbles. 
No reversal of the popular estimate of, and attendance 
upon, the play-house, need be looked for while the 
Church, with mistaken charity and complaisance, casts 
its mantle over levity and folly, instead of pointing the 
way of light and holiness. 

The views which have been just declared upon the 
subject of entertainment and amusement-hunting by 
and on behalf of the (outward) Church are convincingly 
and at length set forth in a pamphlet of 61 pages lately 
issued by the Presbyterian Board of Publication.* The 
opinion is therein expressed (corroborating what has 
been said before) that the Church is now rather regarded 
as a convenient medium of social intercourse and social 
pleasures than as an educator of the religious affections, 
the author quoting in support of this view from an essay 
(which has elicited considerable remark) upon " Certain 
Dangerous Tendencies of American Life" (Boston, i88o\ 
" The Church," according to the essayist, " is now for the 

* The Sociable, the Entertainment, and the Bazar. By Alfred E. Myers, Pastor of the 
Presbyterian Church of Owasco, N. Y. 



THE THEATRE. 79 

most part a depository of social rather than religious in- 
fluences. Its chief force or vitality is no longer religious. 
* * * p or a ver y large class the Church furnishes 
opportunity for a pleasant social life, which is in no way 
different from the social life of amiable, intelligent people 
out of the Church : that there is nothing distinctively re- 
ligious about it."* 

It should be premised that the Presbyterian writer is 
solicitous not to be understood as in any wise discour- 
aging the commingling of those comprising a congrega- 
tion in any right way. Indeed, there are few things 
more helpful to the young who yearn for a better life than 
the life they may have previously led, than the chaste yet 
cheerful conversation of the spiritually dignified and dedi- 
cated servants of the Lord, who give evidence that they 
look for a " city which hath foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God." 

Having pointed out that a first result of the Church 
" sociable " is, that instead of social distinctions with their 
attractions and repulsions being submerged, it causes 
them to " rise into a conspicuousness " which they 
would not otherwise possess ; that " the 
sociable not only does not help the spir- 
itual growth of the Church, but by a fac- 
titious bustle and stir diverts attention from spiritual de- 
ficiencies," he next proceeds to show how the sociable 



The Church soci- 
able a forerunner of 
unseemly entertain* 
ments. 



* The Illustrated Christian Weekly tersely defines the distinction when it says r— 
4 ' Christian workers find the social spirit active and strong among them, but it comes 
as an incident, nSt as the end of their practical fellowship." 



SO THE THEATRE. 

commonly merges into the entertainment, merry-making, 
and feast, all showing a forsaking of the simple, apostoli- 
cal Church economy. Now, the entertainment appears 
to have become possible through a reversal of the Scrip- 
ture prerogative of those who should be as " nursing 
fathers and mothers," — these, instead of leading the flock, 
satisfying themselves with the thought that as religion 
should be made palatable to the young it is expedient to 
push them to the front in all activities, especially in 
amusements. Of numerous instances cited by the author, 
it will suffice to quote the following : 

" A church which has recently received a number of 
young people into active membership is the scene of a 
humorous entertainment. A stage is laid over the pulpit 
platform and over the place lately occupied by the com- 
munion-table, and there the young converts, with others, 
are encouraged to perform for the benefit of the church. 
At another entertainment a group of young gentlemen go 
through the form of selling at auction a young lady to 
the highest bidder. At another of these diversions, be- 
fore people of education and refined taste, a professional 
musician renders a roystering bacchanalian song with 
startling energy. Clergymen and their wives figure in 
costume as George Washington and Martha Washington. 

One minister reads humorous selections; 

another sings comic songs ; others make 
droll speeches. The pulpit is sometimes removed, and 
Santa Claus and his chimney occupy the platform. Again, 
in just such a position, along with other attractions, we 



The Church walk' 
ing with the world. 



THE THEATRE. gl 

have an organ-grinder, with a wealthy middle-aged citi- 
zen sustaining the dignified role of the monkey passing the 
hat for pennies. The superintendent of a Sunday-school, 
chalked and painted, poses as an ancient king, and teachers 
amuse the audience with a semblance of stage embraces. 
Under the auspices of a Sunday-school a college glee- 
club provokes great merriment by its bold allusions to 
the truths which, in the school, are taught as tremendous 
verities. In the ' Old Folks' Concert' solemn hymns and 
revered tunes are sung in a drawling style to raise a 
laugh." At an " exhibition in the lecture-room of a 
prominent church * * a worthy gentleman of remark- 
able sobriety of deportment and visage, and excellent in 
the prayer-meeting, played ' the sneezer,' and another 
Christian gentleman feigned intoxication, with his fair 
and temperate face smeared with red blotches to assist 
the illusion." All these things, be it said, for the cause 
(so claimed) of Christ, yet all so demoralizing in their 
tendency, and withal so revolting to reasoning minds, 
that only the obligation of a required duty can be excuse 
for their presentation here. I refrain from taking up the 
cognate subject of the Bazar, with its trivial and mis- 
chievous accompaniments, supplying the place thereof 
with these apt lines of the author of " The Church Walk- 
ing with the World," — 



" And fairs and shows in the halls were held, 
And the world and her children were there, 
And laughter and music and feasts prevailed 
In the place that was meant for prayer." 



Deadening effects 
of these entertain- 
ments. 



82 THE THEATRE. 

Without controversy, these things can only operate to 
deaden the spiritual life of the participants, and, in the 
case of those who exhibit an aptitude for smartly per- 
forming their parts, to draw them really to the stage as 
actors and actresses. Instances of such a result are not 
rare. It must hence be apparent that, so far from fes- 
tivities and entertainments preserving 
the younger members of the Church 
from the contaminations of the world, 
there will rather happen, as the writer from whom I have 
quoted concludes — " a graduation from the church 
drama to the better-appointed and better-acted drama of 
the theatre, and from the somewhat tame evening enter- 
tainment in the church-parlor to the ball which is not 
held in the interest of the church." 

The problem, therefore, seems naturally to narrow 
itself down to this : that if avowed Christians of " respec- 
tability" would have the vile variety theatres of the 
poorer classes removed from our cities, such persons can- 
not consistently give countenance to the play-houses 
of the so-styled " better sort ;" and if they would have the 
low music-halls, with their tawdry and lewd accessories 
abolished, they, on their part, should have naught to do 
with the elegant opera, its alluring ballet and unsavory 
plot. As discerned by the Apostle Peter, " the time is 
come that judgment must begin at the house of God," 
and this discernment and resultant separation (it may be 
added) should additionally extend to the picture and art 
galleries, the highly spiced drawing-room fiction, the 



The problem 
briefly stated. 



THE THEATRE. 83 

private wine-cellars and billiard rooms, the stock jobbing, 
etc., of the well-to-do and presumably respectable pro- 
fessed Christians, if any headway is to be 
made against the common drinking 
and gambling habits, and the cheap, demoralizing litera- 
ture of the day. It is not evident to the writer how any 
other conclusion is to be arrived at, and, with this per- 
suasion before him, he would ask attention to the 
thoughtful words of three widely separated, but coin- 
ciding witnesses, touching the matter of holy fidelity : 

" To do all our duty," says the late Charles G. Finney, 
" we must rebuke sin in high places. Can this be done 
with all needed severity without, in many cases, giving 
offense and incurring the charge of censoriousness ? No ; 
it is impossible — and to maintain the contrary would be 
to impeach the wisdom and holiness of Jesus Christ." 

" The law of the spiritual life," says a late writer in the 
Independent, " is separation. God's people first separated 
from the dead religious world at Jerusalem. The testi- 
mony of the early Church was one of 
life for a world to come. It gathered 
both its testimony and its life about a risen Christ. It 
did not study to make peace with the world or how to 
adjust itself to its surroundings, but it steadily testified 
against it, and called upon the people of God to break 
with it." 

Finally, to quote one who appears to be a clergyman 
of the English Established Church, the author of the 
brochure, " Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism," 



Three witnesses to 
holy fidelity. 



S4" THE THEATRE. 

—" Until the world," he says, " is wholly converted, 
which nobody yet pretends, His [Christ's] people must 
ever wage with it a deadly war. There can be no peace 
between two such armies as the soldiers of Christ and the 
servants of the devil. His disciples must fight as their 
Captain fought, making themselves [if need be] an 
offense, a nuisance, an abhorrence to every man who is 
not, like them, an open confessor of His name." 

Therefore, in dealing with theatrical entertainments 
and similar stumbling devices within the pale of the pro- 
fessing Church, as also with the theatre itself, and all 
that is allied to it, in society and the world, it may be 
morally profitable for those concerned to bear in mind 
the uncompromising example set by the Master in cleans- 
ing the Temple of that which denied it. In Christ we see 
infinite compassion, even unto death, for sinners, but not 
a moment's parley with sin. Instructive, and of good 
warrant, likewise, for our guidance, is the narrative of the 
crafty procedure of Zion's active enemy, Tobiah the Am- 
monite, who, in the absence of Nehemiah, the Governor, 
so far overcame with his guile even the High Priest him- 
self as to have plausibly persuaded the 
latter to prepare him " a chamber in the 
courts of the house of God." No doubt 
Tobiah was a man of polished speech, who could min- 
ister abundant entertainment to 'his hearers, yet when 
Nehemiah heard of the evil that had been done — how 
like an odious barnacle, the world, in the person of 
the Ammonite, had fastened itself upon the very 



Two examples to 
follow in dealing with 
the theatre. 



THE THEATRE. 85 

house of God — it "grieved" him "sore," insomuch that 
he summarily '■' cast forth all the household stuff of 
Tobiah out of the chamber." Would that all magis- 
trates and others in authority who have to deal with 
theatres and theatrical entertainments might emulate the 
godly zeal (according to knowledge) of Nehemiah, the 
righteous Governor. 

In concluding this essay, perhaps I can do no better 
than to revive the language of the Address issued by 
Frankford Monthly Meeting of Friends to its members 
(1880), wherein it is said : 

" In much tenderness we beseech you, dear young 
people of every class, to bring this whole question of 
amusement and recreation to your loving Saviour. With 
His teachings, as set forth in the New 
Testament, before you, and by the light 
of His grace in your hearts, pray for wisdom and 
strength, and you will be given clearly to see what it is 
and who they are that are truly serving God, and what 
and who are serving Him not ; what will make for your 
own soul's peace, and what will hinder it ; and wherein 
your true safety lies." 



A safe conclusion 
recommended. 



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